TJ Simers on changes in Los Angeles Times sports section going into effect Monday

Long-term advertising contracts are the only thing keeping the print edition alive in a lot of markets.

As a person in a high place at a newspaper company told me a few years ago: “Let’s just say that when a press breaks, we aren’t going to fix it.”

 

My son the new homeowner bought a grill, a charcoal Weber. He got a fire starting chimney and yesterday he had his first cookout. Said it went fine but he had a hard time finding paper to put in the bottom on the chimney because "we don't have any newspaper in the house." He lives in Brooklyn so I told him to go out and buy a Sunday Times this weekend. He and his wife are like Target A for most of the advertisers on earth, working couple with good jobs, new child, new home, etc. And he hasn't bought a print paper since the Red Sox won the 2004 Series when he was in college.

 

Having intimate knowledge of one of those shops, it was a successful strategy, even when you had enough time to write a traditional gamer. A column/feature/insider based off a game has a longer tail than a traditional gamer.

 

Hell, I was doing it in 1982 covering Knoxville Blue Jays Double-A games. Write feature, include score, put a little "Notes" header at the end where you write a paragraph or two about the game.

 

Nope, won't go there. And it may be a function of my age, but no.

Allowed, the gamer must change with the times -- less play-by-play, more telling why or how what happened, happened. But a well-crafted gamer is still a delight.

And it's not sticking the final score into the second graf of a feature.

 

IMO, the "gamer" means different things when it's 1 game out of 12 vs. 1 of 162.

 

No. He needs these.

 

Simers can be…Simers, but a magazine-style sports front, every day, will be exhausting.

 

Simers, believing he was entitled to be paid $250,000 a year to write a column three times a week until the day that he died, sued for millions of dollars.

Now you can see why the Times was trying desperately to get other voices in the paper.

 

Simers might be surprised at how few people actually know who he is.

(laughs before the joke like ron desantis)