For those of you that don’t know, in the last few months the US has lost a few newspapers.  The Rocky Mountain News closed in Jan and the Seattle Post Intelligencer could be close behind.   This past off-season several East coast papers offered buy-outs to most of the sports staff, trying at least to get rid of the quality writers who after years of being on the paper were a big part of the budget.

This Russ Adams and Tim Marchman story from the Wall Street Journal gives some insight.

Add to their piece that the Chicago Herald has stopped sending writers to cover games on the road, and that the Hartford Courant cut out their Yankees beat writer a few years ago and you realize that the online writers are going to become more important.  Additionally, this past season, two online writers were inducted into the American Baseball Writers Association- so the ABBWA has figured out how to stay relevant.

The thing you may not know though is the MLB has a stock policy of not credentialing independent online sites.  What does independent constitute?  Well, one would think it was just independent from MLB, but its not.  See, MLB needs ESPN, Sports Illustrated etc.  So they are fine.  Its those of us who they aren’t sure they need that they want to keep out.

I get credentialed by certain clubs anyway.  Mostly the ones that need the press, because the ESPN’s of the world aren’t covering them.  I know how to behave and try to stay out of the way.  I have earned the priveledge very slowly and very carefully.  Still, not every club that should credential me does. And though I understand their hesitancy, because once they let me in how do they stop the guy who doesn’t know how to behave, I think its ridiculous.  As I said to one Director of Media Relations this past spring, the difference betweent the guy who sits in his basement spouting out diatribes who if credentialed would follow around the star player the entire day and someone like me is the traffic the site generates.  Traffic can be checked through a number of other websites.  The guy in his basement isn’t generating the kind of traffic that warrents the need for him to get a credential. His thoughts are new enough for those that check him out, but aren’t drawing enough interest from others.  I’m not sure mine are always that original.  But I do my best to keep the content fresh.  I have other writers working to help me out.

As newspapers fail, the writers focused on any one team are going to diminish.  The media directors in those small markets need to come up with a policy to ensure that someone is writing about their team.  Fans need access to their team to develop and maintain the relationship. If teams must rely on just MLB or ESPN to get their information out, look for the big market teams to grow and the small market teams to wither, no matter the revenue sharing plan.

Its a shame that newspapers aren’t able to come up with an online business model to keep themselves afloat.  But this is an area where MLB can not afford to linger behind the times, or they will find themselves with teams struggling for exposure.