RIP ESPN The Magazine

Yeah, he's all excited until he throws four picks and you're the one who cost him the scholarship.

 

Is that kid planning on buying or reading the newspaper?

 

I worked at a paper that did this, too, for years. And honestly, it probably did help subscriptions in a bedroom community with lots of new residents who might not otherwise feel any connection to the local area (and its paper). I claim to this day that my spelling skills have never recovered from seeing so many words spelled incorrectly; I still know when something's wrong but no longer am sure what's right. And I was always astonished how many things came in on stationery from law firms and medical groups that showed a complete lack of basic writing skills. (On the bright side, the entire sports staff often got a good laugh out of sharing the worst writing.)

 

I don't know if the kids buy the paper, but they definitely get excited when a reporter/photographer shows up.

Local High School quarterback's family told me they were going to subscribe when they got home from the game to get through our paywall. Dad also said, "You just sold a whole mess of papers." But my favorite was a random call from a grandma halfway across the country who couldn't figure out our subscription page but just had to read about her grandbaby... who, now that I think about it, is also a quarterback. I walked her through the process, and she sent me a snail-mail postcard and an invitation to her AirBnB.

 

How long ago was that? People DID subscribe because of that, but I'm not sure they do anymore.

The first daily I worked for way back when did this with Little League baseball and youth softball. I know because I was responsible for typing it up every week. We got piles of little synopses/highlights turned in by a team parent from each team/league in the area and I typed it all up, baseball one day and softball another. Fun...

But it was all about getting the names in, and we had so much of this stuff every week that we had to start printing the information in near-agate-sized type (I think it was maybe a little bigger than that, if I remember correctly).

 

Years ago we would run weekly rec league softball standings with some game highlights. We would see people go to a rack, buy a paper and go right to the sports section to see if their name was listed.

I would sometimes be asked why I listed Johnny Softball's 3-for-3 performance over Billy Basehit's 2-for-4 with a grand slam.

 

RBIs are good, right?

 

The first paper I worked for ran nightly youth baseball linescores for all levels, T-ball to whatever. And they were all called in before the internet era. Nobody could go out to eat between 6:30 and 8:30, then it was a scramble to see who could get out of the door fastest. Oh, and the damn thing would take up 2 full columns, there were that many of them. Those were not fun times.

 

When I was just a baby reporter working for a big-city metro, we used to publish a youth sports roundup in the local zoned section for where the team was based. That stuff never appeared in the full-run Sports section. I used to be the writer, so I remember the sheer hell of putting together something with no actual news. But it was popular, and when the roundup didn't appear for some reason — vacations, lack of reported results, etc. — we'd get whining phone calls. But that was 30 years ago, before the internet became a household thing.

Now? There's no youth sports roundup, and that big-city metro folded three years ago when it was bought and folded by its main competitor.

Times change; human behavior is predictable. The youth sports roundup was popular back then, only because there were no other options to get the kids' names publicized ... but, admittedly, there was no value to it beyond the appearance that we were covering the community. Today, the metro paper that managed to survive barely covers even preps, let alone youth sports, because it hasn't been shown to generate readership or sales. They just post online whatever gets called in, and there's no imperative for them to chase the results that aren't. Which seems weird, considering my background in local sports, because where I live is a major metro area, but isn't that big, in reality.

 

So is ESPN The Mag done now after this skin issue?

 

Yep. Started my first job near the end of the city slow pitch season and every week I'd spend my Fridays going to the rec department, picking up a week's worth of scoresheets and writing a roundup. Same with youth baseball in the spring. Now I think all the youth baseball and softball leagues have their own web pages.

 

Economics change. I was told by an executive of the Denver Post in the 70's that a newspaper had to be at least 25% editorial and only 75% ads are they would lose preferential post office rates.

So if a paper started to receive additional advertising because the population of the metro area was growing, such as in Denver and many other cities, the paper had to come up with additional editorial content. Every additional three line classified required an additional line of editorial. Paying you a presumably small salary was a cheap way to fill the space. And what else could they have put in that would have drawn as much interest?