Want to know what Grandpa thinks? Read the sports page

It was a typical work day when the newsroom staff of a local newspaper was quickly assembled for an impromptu meeting. During this meeting, everyone learned that the paper would be folding and they’d be out of a job within weeks.

Thanks for your hard work. Take it easy. And don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

That was my experience a little over 10 years ago and it was the same experience the folks at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer went through last week. Their newspaper – in my opinion the best in the region – is up for sale. They have 60 days to find a buyer or it’s over. If a buyer isn’t found, and I don’t believe one will, they’ll continue with an online edition with a drastically reduced staff.

It is an unfortunate inevitability. Newspapers are expensive to run and advertising is expensive to buy. Very few mom-and-pop small businesses can afford to advertise in local newspapers and national chains spend their money only where they are guaranteed to get the highest return on investment. The media companies that own the newspapers have been mismanaged for decades as well.

But those aren’t the only reasons. Newspapers have been glacially slow to adapt to a younger audience with changing reading habits. Papers looked down on technology and the Internet while making a halfhearted attempt to reach younger readers. When they finally did venture online, they were slow to adopt a strategy to allow readers to reach out to one another through blogs and communities.

The sports pages, where I worked right out of college, are a good example of this. Opinions matter to younger readers, but there wasn’t a voice they could relate to. You have to toil for decades as a sportswriter before they let you write an opinion. As a result, nearly all of the regular columnists are over 50 years old.

To someone in his mid 20s or 30s, these columnists come off as grumpy old men who want to jam the greatness of Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays down you’re throat every chance they get. There’s no denying these players were great, but Sandy Koufax’s last season was seven years before I was born. I was brought into this life four months before Willie Mays hung ‘em up. And I’m not a young man anymore. I’ve got two kids, two mortgages and an expanding waistline. Where’s the voice of my generation?

Only recently have newspapers figured out that people over the age of 50 are eventually going to die and take with them their entire readership. The Seattle Times has tried to adapt by hiring on Jerry Brewer, who seems to be the only columnist that may have collected Star Wars figures at some point in his life.

But for every Jerry Brewer, there are a half dozen Steve Kelleys, Blaine Newnhams and Jim Moores. The P-I must have threatened to drop a statue of Don James on Jim Moore’s head in October to get him to write some stuff for a blog. Now, it seems the electronic pages of the P-I’s online edition might be the only place he’ll be published.

A watershed moment happened in April when journalist and hot head Buzz Bissinger went after sports blogger Will Leitch on Bob Costas’ HBO talk show. Bissinger acted like an out of touch fossil and perfectly illustrated a prevailing attitude within newspaper management. If you believe Bissinger, sports blogs will directly contribute to the downfall of civilization.



Is there some really nasty stuff that is posted on sports blogs? Absolutely – but there is some really great stuff as well. Should I question the journalistic integrity of Sports Illustrated because both it and Hustler are magazines?

With the P-I’s demise, the Seattle community loses a lot. The newspaper makes cross-town rival The Seattle Times work harder. Competition between the Times and P-I newsrooms ensures we get the best, most honest news. That’s in jeopardy now.

I hope a buyer comes to the rescue of the P-I. It would be hard to lose another regional institution. Unfortunately, the wheels were set in motion for this tragedy decades ago.