As you may well know, if you have followed my writing in this space, I only sustain this local news blog in Fishers, Indiana because other news outlets have not been paying enough attention to Fishers. That’s what I thought when I began this blog in 2012, and that is sadly what I still believe today. LarryInFishers.com is totally a volunteer operation, consisting of me and only me.
Journalism is in trouble at the local level in America, but at the national level, there are major earthquakes rumbling throughout sports reporting. Yes, sports has journalists.
Sports Illustrated (SI) has had the reputation of being the Cadillac of sports reporting, since I was just a young kid reading about sports (trust me, that was a long time ago). Sadly, those days are gone.
SI has gone through some ownership changes, with the latest laying off about half the entire editorial staff at the magazine. The owners have stripped SI of it’s soul, it’s writers and photographers. Sports Illustrated is gone as we have known it.
The latest casualty is Deadspin. This started as a wild and irreverent sports blog in 2005 where you could tell the small staff of writers were having fun and readers loved it. It was bought and sold a few times until something called G/O Media decided to buy it.
An edict came down from on high at the company, ordering Deadspin editor Barry Petchesky to no longer write about anything political…stick to sports, Deadspin was told. Petchesky refused to follow the order, was fired and most of the rest of the writing staff left with him.
G/O Media says Deadspin will not go away, it will still be around. Yes, the same way Sports Illustrated is still around.
For years, newspaper reporters & editors called the sports pages the “candy store” of journalism. For many years, it probably was.
That was before the major issues of our day began to bleed into the sports world. That’s why Deadspin could not be true to itself and follow the owner’s edict to stay away from politics.
National sports journalism is on the wane and that is sad for all of us. But, there is hope.
The best hope I have found is The Athletic, a Web site that charges a monthly fee but does not pester you with advertising. It has hired many excellent national sportswriters (many are former SI writers).
But The Athletic’s biggest strength is its local stable of writers. Bob Kravitz, Stephen Holder and many others cover pro and college sports in Indiana. From all indications, The Athletic is doing very well. If you are a sports fan, get a trial subscription. I suspect you will be lured into the subscriber status. In my view, it’s that good. (Full disclosure, nobody at The Athletic paid me to write that, I just believe it to be true)
So, journalism is in some trouble, in sports and in local coverage. For local news, I’m still around for free if you are interested in what’s going on in and around Fishers. Allow me to add that the Hamilton County Reporter, with which I have a news-gathering partnership, does a nice job covering Hamilton County Sports. You see some of the work produced by Spots Editor Richie Hall and others at the Reporter on this news blog.
I suppose there is hope. Just subscribe to newspapers and news services. Journalism is hard work, labor intensive and deserves your support. Without that support, journalism goes away. Do you really want to live in a nation with few or no independent news sources?