Newsday eliminates Powell, Howard

What's the worst insult in sports? Quitter. The entire newspaper industry is run by quitters. Waah, we lost our monopoly on free money!! So we'll stop producing a product that can sell, because competing is too hard on our stockholders!!!
As noted before, I was ahead of the curve getting laid off in 2005. I've moved on, not totally happily, but not totally unhappily either. The Herald, a second paper in a town that doesn't really need two, was a special case. But didn't anyone on this board regard Moddy's career move is the canary in the coal mine? Sports editor at reasonably big paper WALKS AWAY to academe? What does that say?
Anyone in newspapers who doesn't spend at least an hour a day thinking and planning about a move to another business is not managing themselves well.

 

Imagine the well-meaning folks getting back in after being shown the door. It's like giving a horribly abusive relationship another try.

 

I'm sitting in my hotel room in Atlanta, just flatted stunned. And I'm not easily stunned by what's happening at newspapers these days. If you'd have asked me to list the papers with the best and most effective pair of sports columnists in America, I'd have put Newsday in the top five. There's Kansas City. The LA Times and the Washington Post. Some others are really good -- St. Pete, Orlando -- but Newsday was right there. I don't know Johnette particularly, but she does tremendous work. Shaun is ridiculously underrated. We didn't often overlap in the things we write about, but when we did -- say, at the Olympics -- I'd find myself saying, all the time, "Damn, why didn't I think of that?" If these two are not safe, nobody is safe. I'm certainly not safe. My best to Johnette, Shaun and all the other good, passionate people being cast aside by a business determined to destroy itself.

 

Hey, you can always start brushing up on subject matter jurisdiction, Geoff.

;-)

 

Oh, how I hated civil procedure.

 

Taking Michael_Gee's point about quitters a step further, here's another comparison between sports and our dying business in which our side looks like severe losers:

We rag on sports teams and leagues and owners plenty in our jobs, but most of the time, they compete. Compete hard. And when there is talent to be added, someone goes after it hard. NBA teams wouldn't let Tracy McGrady, Andre Miller, Joe Johnson or Michael Redd go unemployed for more 60 seconds before they'd be snapping them up as a way to get better. Same with MLB, NHL, NFL and any other truly professional sport. It might require that someone at the end of the roster, making a low salary, gets cut, but sports are meritocracies -- if you can play at the highest levels, you will have a job.

Now look at our business, where we so often sit in judgment of these sports teams and leagues. Our business doesn't give a damn about competing, not really, not at the highest levels. There are at least two dozen sports journalists -- maybe way more -- who are tremendously talented and quite possibly "better" than folks currently filling roster spots. But are papers or magazines competing to snap them up, to get better? No effin' way. Forget about meritocracies in our world of phonies. Publishers don't want to pursue excellence and the fact is, readers and advertisers know it and have stopped playing along. What might have sufficed in near-monopoly media times is doomed now.

The next one of us who rips a team for not spending more on payroll to satisfy its fans and the general spirit of competition ought to remember that our business is run entirely by Donald Sterlings, Jeff Lorias and the Bidwills.

 

Davidoff said he has not been laid off. He said the NY Post got that wrong.

 

That's the thing, though. Their positions were ELIMINATED. It's not a question of cheaper.
They're saying their readers don't care to read opinion and analysis on the sports page.
HUH???
Have they ever done a reader survey?
If you're not giving your readers opinion and analysis on a sports page, what can they get that they don't already know?

 

A lot of sports sections rendered feature or takeout writers obsolete -- or maybe just filled the void when bean counters deemed them obsolete via space, travel and budget constraints -- by having their beat people do the longball stories and projects, using it as an opportunity to promote those folks as "experts."

The exact same thing can be done now, especially with game stories mattering less and less. Let each sport's "expert" do the opinion and analysis, and then handle the basic beat chores on the side. That is how a place like Newsday could make general sports columnists expendable. It would lose a lot, in the eyes of most of us. But it might not lose much in the eyes of readers, God bless their undiscerning and dwindling numbers.

 

I've always believed in that. I've always thought it's hard for anybody to be an expert in everything. I've never thought it damaged the ability of a writer to cover a beat by injecting opinion into coverage; a lot of people believe it's there, anyway, witness the reaction to Jerry Tipton's even-handed coverage of Kentucky.
If that's what they're up to with their section, it's defensible.
Not finding use for two talented, dedicated, versatile journalists is indefensible, however much money they make.

 

Thinking? Yes.

Planning? Comes with great difficulty to me.

I wouldn't know where to start.

 

This is part of what I was getting at in my "it's not as bad as initially reported" post ... but I'm still hoping somebody will weigh in with the full story.