I'm all in favor of bringing back the "dinosaurs and women in fur bikinis" genre.

Jim Caple has an almost-poignant column about what the demise of newspapers means for fans. Well, actually, it’s more about how bad the writers feel about newspapers worldwide going bankrupt and how sports fans will suffer accordingly when they’re gone. But it’s dangerously close to making a point.

I worry about it, too. As a once-and-future professional writer, I’ve seen way too many friends laid off recently and there is nothing else to fall back on. Everything and everyone is hurting and the notion of losing a gig is genuinely terrifying, because there may *no* other outlet to fall back on. Period.

On the other hand, halfway down his almost-poignant essay is precisely the problem.

YOU TELL YOUR STATISTICS TO SHUT UP.

Oh, yeah. These things are dying for a reason and Jim Caple has inadvertently pointed us to the cause: a refusal to change with the times. There was a lovely article in Salon covering the desperate, flailing attempts of the Rocky Mountain News to reinvent itself, while still basically being the same thing. The problem the newspaper business is having is, simply, they want to keep selling shitloads of paper ads to people, wrapped in a thin candy shell of content, when their content is too old to be relevant and their readerbase is dying at a rapid rate. Similarly, sportswriters are, usually, the embodiment of SPORTS TRADITION, be it a Caple-esque sneering whenever sabermetrics are brought up or be it things like an old white guy’s refusal to come to grips with urban culture because BACK IN MY DAY BAH GAWD THEY PLAYED 2 GAMES A DAY IN WOOL UNIFORMS AND LIKED IT. We all fear change, especially as we get older.

But change gives no crap whether you care or not. It’s coming.

Do I have a solution? If I did, I’d have a staff of some of the best writers in the business, more banging down my door, and a hat made of money. There are enough fans of sports who will spend money that someone out there will find a way to profit from it, be it subscription websites or be it something we haven’t even dared to dream of. And the old dinosaurs will, undoubtely, scream YOU TELL YOUR NEW BUSINESS MODELS TO SHUT UP right before the asteroid lands on them.

Source.

Rick Vaughn jim caple, page 2, sportswriting