2009-11-06T11:24:20-05:00 <p><strong>Murray Chass</strong> <a href="http://www.murraychass.com/?p=1066" target="_blank">reports</a> that 29 of the 60 newspapers that travel with teams during the regular season haven't sent correspondents to cover the World Series. This ought to worry you, for two reasons.</p> <p>First is that while you wouldn't know it by reading smug digital utopians braying about the uselessness of newspapers in an online era, tens of millions of people, a disproportionate number of them older, don't use the Internet. This is actually true! To suggest that a reader of the <em>Dayton Daily News</em> or <em>Detroit Free Press</em> should just go online if they want informed coverage ignores lots of people -- people who aren't comfortable with computers, people who don't have one in their home and don't use one in their work, people who just don't like reading online. That's not to say that these people have a Constitutional right to newspaper coverage of the Series. But the loss of it, and of the coverage it represents more broadly, is a problem for real baseball fans, not just reporters who are losing work.</p> <p>The more important issue is that smaller newspapers are a check on the increasing power of Major League Baseball. If we really end up in a world where hardly anyone but MLB.com and a few national outlets, some of them business partners of MLB, are providing full-bore coverage of the sport, that's not only going to lead to limited choices for readers, but it's going to give central baseball enormous leverage over the kind of coverage provided.</p> 2009-11-02T12:23:17-05:00 2 2009-11-02T12:23:17-05:00 1 1 10 2009-11-03T13:23:53-05:00 2 NJ cr1 Allendale 907320 3 You're right, MyTriState.us. My 90-year-old mother doesn't use computers anymore, but she and all her senior pals follow sports news on TV as well as in the papers. She thinks sports coverage is wall-to-wall compared with the 'good old days'. 7515642 2009-11-03T10:03:19-05:00 2 NJ cr1 Allendale 907320 1 You haven't provided enough information to get me worried. First big hole in your story: how many of the 60 sent reporters to last year's WS? The one before that? Five years before? In other words, tell me how the numbers have declined before you try to convince me that the sky is falling. Second big hole: How many more reporters from national sports news sources, like ESPN and SI and the various RSN's, are covering the post-season than back in the day? In other words, is there really less coverage? Or is it just different coverage from different sources? Answers? 7510713 2 <p><strong>Murray Chass</strong> <a href="http://www.murraychass.com/?p=1066" target="_blank">reports</a> that 29 of the 60 newspapers that travel with teams during the regular season haven't sent correspondents to cover the World Series. This ought to worry you, for two reasons.</p> <p>First is that while you wouldn't know it by reading smug digital utopians braying about the uselessness of newspapers in an online era, tens of millions of people, a disproportionate number of them older, don't use the Internet. This is actually true! To suggest that a reader of the <em>Dayton Daily News</em> or <em>Detroit Free Press</em> should just go online if they want informed coverage ignores lots of people -- people who aren't comfortable with computers, people who don't have one in their home and don't use one in their work, people who just don't like reading online. That's not to say that these people have a Constitutional right to newspaper coverage of the Series. But the loss of it, and of the coverage it represents more broadly, is a problem for real baseball fans, not just reporters who are losing work.</p> <p>The more important issue is that smaller newspapers are a check on the increasing power of Major League Baseball. If we really end up in a world where hardly anyone but MLB.com and a few national outlets, some of them business partners of MLB, are providing full-bore coverage of the sport, that's not only going to lead to limited choices for readers, but it's going to give central baseball enormous leverage over the kind of coverage provided.</p> 84621 http://img.fannation.com/upload/user_profile/image/813/744/thumb/tim-marchman-fannation.jpg 3 IL Tim Marchman Chicago 814404