Newspapers increase drain-circling velocity

The latest newspaper figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations are just jaw-dropping. Editor & Publisher reports that daily circulation for the six months ending March 31 was off 7 percent at 395 dailies, compared to the same period the year before.

But at some of the country’s most prominent papers, it’s much worse than that. The New York Post lost 20 percent — one in five people who was reading the Post a year ago is no longer reading it. Same goes for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The Miami Herald, Newark Star-Ledger and San Francisco Chronicle lost about 16 percent, or about one in six readers. The Houston Chronicle and New York Daily News about 14 percent. And on and on. Sunday numbers are similar.

The only news event in my lifetime that I can compare this to is the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late ’80s. I remember reading the stories coming out of Moscow in 1988 and ’89 as the USSR dismantled itself and thinking, “I’m watching the end of something I never dreamed would end in my lifetime — and I’m not that old!”

I’m saying that again, though the not-that-old part is quite a bit less true.

It’s not quite the same with newspapers. They’re not going to disappear completely. But right before our eyes, they’re collapsing as a central institution in our culture. It’s as if streetlights or shoes or sliced bread went away. You just never thought you’d see it, did you? Life would go on without those things, but it would be different. Something would replace them. Maybe better, maybe not.

Because I’m excited about the possibilities of what might replace newspaper’s role, I know it seems like I’m happy to see them go, that I’m dancing on their grave. I’m not. I’m sorry to see them fail like this. I’m sad and worried about the many people, some of whom I know, who have lost their jobs and the many more who have an ax over their heads.

And I’m sorry to see the decline. For all the brave new worldness of my first online job in 1996, I missed working at the newspaper. I missed being in a big-city newsroom with seasoned newspaper people, the most senior of whom had hired on after returning from World War II. I missed being a part of something with direct ties, a straight historical line, to the 19th century. I missed helping to produce a product that I could see people using as I rode the bus home from my shift.

Still do.

That said, the utter failure rampant in newspapers couldn’t have happened to a more deserving industry. It didn’t have to happen, and it isn’t just happening because the Internet came along and changed everything. More on that next time.

Newspaper crisis means MLB plays in secret

Terrible news on the death of newspapers front. A USA Today report the other day told the story in its headline. Shrinking newsrooms put squeeze on MLB coverage.

Reporter Mel Antonen notes that membership in the Baseball Writers Association of America is off by 65 writers this year, reflective of newsroom layoffs and newspapers ceasing or sharing beat coverage. The Dallas Morning News and Fort Worth Star-Telegram, for example, share beat writers covering the Texas Rangers.

Those papers have always been competitors, but now they’ve united against a common enemy: their obsolescence.

Antonen paraphrases Los Angeles Dodgers exec Josh Rawitch noting the drop in newspaper reporters covering teams. A dozen or so traveled with the Dodgers in the early ’90s, compared to just two this season, plus the mlb.com beat writer.

I wonder how long MLB and most of its teams will keep using the “press box space” excuse when denying credentials to online writers.

Rawitch also points out that the loss of newspaper writers affects radio and TV stations that, in Antonen’s words, “need fodder from newspaper accounts of the games and notes.”

This of course is a microcosm of the larger crisis in journalism. Without newspapers, there simply isn’t enough raw information. I mean, I’m really having trouble following this baseball season so far, aren’t you? There just isn’t enough information out there. Never mind radio and TV stations. Won’t somebody please think of the bloggers?

My first thought when I saw Rawitch’s I.D. as a Dodgers exec was “I was just wondering whether they were still in the league.” With so many newspaper reporters dropping off the beat, it’s like baseball’s being played in secret.

What are we all going to do with only three beat reporters writing that Shlabotnik scored from second on Casey’s single, instead of 12? How can we really understand the game, I mean really get to the bottom of it, if Shlabotnik’s postgame quote — “I saw Casey hit it and I just ran” — is only scribbled in three notebooks, not a dozen?

The BBWAA lost a net 65 writers this year, Antonen reports, even after its forward-thinking decision to allow 22 Interthingy typists in. You can see for yourself how the BBWAA has its finger on the pulse of the modern world by Googling it.

Search baseball writers association of america and the organization’s home page does not appear in the first 100 results. Most people use Google’s default configuration of 10 results per page, and it’s common knowledge in the SEO world — you can Google that, BBWAA people — that hardly anybody looks beyond Page 1 of their results. The BBWAA home page would be absent from the first 10 pages.

There are three matches for pages on the BBWAA site among the first 100, including the second and third result, a press release about the 2009 Hall of Fame vote and the organization’s awards page.

It’s pretty much the same story if you search for BBWAA.

I’m sparing you the links to those pages because they include the eye-assaulting bright green background that until recently all BBWAA pages sported. Note to BBWAA: Maybe you’re losing members because you’ve blinded the ones who’ve checked your site?

The home page has recently been redesigned with a vision-preserving white background, so it’s safe to say: Here it is.

Now: Weren’t the Yankees and Mets supposed to open new stadiums this year? Has anybody heard anything? These really are dark times.

So I quit the column

And in a little over a week Nick Adenhart, Mark Fidrych and Harry Kalas die and John Madden retires. I think he just wanted to steal my thunder, by the way. A bunch of other interesting things happened too, I think.

I knew it would go like that. Whenever I finally decided to stop writing King Kaufman’s Sports Daily, marked down for quick sale lately to King Kaufman’s Sports, I knew there would be a rash of days when I wouldn’t have had to worry, were I still writing, about coming up with a subject for that day. Those were always the best days, when I didn’t have to agonize over what to write about.

Well here’s what I have to say about John Madden:

Never mind. Doesn’t matter. I’m letting the column run out of my head right now, just watching it flow down the sidewalk.

There’s still a small part of my brain somewhere that’s writing the column all the time, noticing things, considering phrases, forming opinions. I’ll be watching basketball or reading sports news online and I’ll get the familiar trigger feeling — column idea! Here’s what I’m going to say about that. And then I’ll catch myself. Relax. You’re not writing a column anymore. No deadline. Just watch the stupid game. Miss a quarter. Live a little. Don’t even record it.

The reason I only think other interesting things have happened is that I haven’t really been paying attention, which has been nice. Actually, not paying attention isn’t quite right. Not keeping track is more like it. Not saving to disc, in a phrase I coined for myself 20 years ago, meaning I’m seeing it, I’m just not making any effort to remember it. And unlike 20 years ago, if I’m going to remember it, it’s going to take effort.

Wait. Remember what?

Tracy Ringolsby interview

New Salon column is a Q&A with Tracy Ringolsby, who lost his job with the Rocky Mountain News when it closed two weeks ago and immediately started a new blog with two colleagues to continue covering the Colorado Rockies. There’s audio of the interview too.

I’ve been reading Ringolsby since the ’80s, when he worked at the Dallas Morning News and his Sunday notes columns were syndicated. We talked about the future of journalism, a pretty hot topic in my circles lately as the newspaper industry comes crashing down.

My obsession with this subject — my attempts to educate myself about the current thinking, my own efforts to think it through — is the main reason why I haven’t been writing much for Salon lately. There just aren’t enough hours in the day, nor is there enough brain capacity, to think clearly about such disparate subjects and be able to spit out sports commentary I’d stand behind.

I’ll be writing about the Tournament over the next few weeks, I’ll have a Q&A with Allen Barra about his Yogi Berra book and I figure I’ll do the usual baseball season preview nonsense. Maybe by next month my obsession will have passed and I’ll pick up the column pace again.

I’d almost do it for free

The U.K. tabloid News of the World published a shocking photo of Michael Phelps smoking a bong at a college party in South Carolina.

Yes, shocking. A 23-year-old kid who trains slavishly for a solitary sport most of the year sparks up at a party during his off time. I’m just beside myself with astonishment. I mean, what next, people. What next.

The accompanying story reports that Phelps’ people tried to get the NOTW not to publish the photo, and one of the offers was that Phelps would write a sports column for the paper for three years in exchange for keeping the pic under wraps. The paper said no thanks and published the photo.

I’d like to extend a similar offer to News of the World and any other publication, in any language: In exchange for a bong and a three-year supply of marijuana, I will agree NOT to write a sports column.

Interested editors please contact me at this address.

Updike fans bid Updike adieu

New Salon column, a quickie about John Updike, who died Tuesday morning, and his famous baseball piece “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.”

Quickie? Forty minutes from word of Updike’s death reaching Salon to this piece hitting the Web. Five-hundred words. Nothing great or anything, but it’s 500 words. You can count ’em. That old newspaper training comes in handy sometimes.

When Salon was new it used to shock the kids on the editorial staff, who’d come straight from college and hadn’t worked for newspapers or wire services, that someone could turn a story around in a half hour or so. That was when I started feeling like one of the old dudes. I was 33.