I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while. I’ve been put off by how complicated and big a topic it could be. So I’m alllowing myself to be not overly insightful and clever which, often, is the only way you’ll actually get anything written at all. Make that deal with yourself.

Sports writing is changing. Significantly. Even as we speak.

For more than a century, most significant, intelligent discussion in the sports world went though the people writing sports for daily newspapers. Sure, some magazine guys would drop by (Roger Angell, Frank DeFord, etc.) with something weighty and ponderous.

But day by day … it was the full-time hacks in the daily press. Covering the local teams. And if you wanted a big picture, you tried to read all of them. Perhaps in the Sporting News, pre-Web. But that was your source of basic news: The ink-stained wretches of the Fourth Estate.

Was.

That is probably less true right now than at any time since sports became organized, some 150 years ago. For two reasons.

1. The ongoing print journalism implosion that has decimated the ranks of print sports journalists …

2. And the emergence of the serious sports bloggers, particularly Bill Simmons of espn.com.

Things are changing. Quickly, dramatically and perhaps permanently.

Let’s back up for a second.

Historically, people writing in a journalistic style on a daily (or at least more than once -weekly) basis shared certain traits.

1. They almost always had journalism degrees, with all that implies. A sense of media in general. Some sense of its history. A background in journalism standards and practices, including ethics (libel and slander, among other things, including balance) and impartiality.

2. I just hinted at this, but to be more blunt: Sports writers were NOT supposed to be fans. “Cheering in the press box” was a mortal sin, punishable by eternal hazing. Most reporters preferred covering a winner to a loser, yes, because it usually meant more readers and better play in the paper. But your standard beat guys — even the columnists — were not supposed to be members of a team’s “marching and chowder society,” as Vin Scully would put it.

In theory, you were never supposed to know a sports writer’s personal preferences. He or she operated from some lofty plain of even-handedness. In theory.

3. In addition to being trained specifically for the job, sports writers had specific access that others didn’t have. To players, to officials. And that mattered. They were the gate-keepers of information. Fans didn’t have that access. They had to watch from the stands or in front of their televisions, and had to guess at what went on behind the scenes.

Now, all of that is in flux. For several reasons.

1. The ubiquity of television. Every game is televised somewhere. Fans don’t need print reporters to tell them what happened. They already have seen it.

2. The opening up of fan access (albeit passive) to athletes and coaches. The big games feature postgame shows with live interviews of participants. The really big games (thinking NBA Finals here, and maybe the NFL now does this, too) televise the interview sessions between media and coaches/players. In those cases, fans then have exactly as much information as does 90 percent of the deadline media. Even more verbatim quotes are available online. There is almost nothing in terms of additional player reaction, the print journalist can provide, from these media events, that the fan also doesn’t have access to.

Except his/her skill at analysis or wordsmithing. Which takes us to …

3. The rise of the bloggers.

Bill Simmons of espn.com is the poster boy for this.

He has minimal journalism training in the traditional, college-newspaper sense. His under-grad degree is in political science. He apparently was briefly a sports writer for the Boston Herald, which I didn’t know until I saw it on this massive wikipedia entry on the man (and may explain his open contempt for the old-timers of the Boston sports writing community). However long his print journalism tenure, he never mentions it, and I have never heard reference to it.

In his writings — which have to be the most popular item on espn.com — Simmons is a shameless Boston homer. Which mainstream sports journalists find disturbing if not flat wrong. Not after decades of a studied distance between journalist and the team or sport he or she covered.

His reverence for all things Boston is relentless and cloying.

But still …

But still, he writes sports as cleverly as anyone in the country. And he has meaningful often seemingly original insights into many of the topics he takes on, particularly if they pertain to the NFL or the NBA.

(Here is a recent example of a Simmons column on the NBA, one crammed with analysis of a caliber that would impress any sports journalist in the nation.)

I believe a case can be made that Simmons is the most important “sports journalist” in the nation, and almost certainly the most widely read. Even though he isn’t a journalist, in the traditional sense. Even with his Boston homerism and odd forays into pop culture. (Eventually, he will be too old to be hip, which I imagine already has occurred to him.)

He replaces, as numero uno … whom? Some metro columnist somewhere? Someone at USA Today, which doesn’t like columnists and gives them almost no space? Someone at Sports Illustrated?

I’m not sure there was a clear No. 1. Everyone was regional or too occasional. Simmons is national and regular.

And, perhaps telling, after ESPN went out and spent a boatload of money to hire away “traditional journalist” Rick Reilly from SI … Simmons clearly is still their best guy. Reilly seems pedestrian and dull by comparison. And anything but prolific, with his one column per week, in the usual sports journalism style, as Simmons runs around frenetically, apparently seeing every NFL game and most played in the NBA, as well, and showing a staggering ability to synthesize what has just happened — as demonstrated by the monstrously long yet utterly engrossing pieces he churns out.

I believe Reilly is stuck in the print mode, as are many of us. With strict limits on words, story length. Simmons and other bloggers suffer from no such self-imposed (when it comes to electronic media) restrictions.

There are others outside the traditional sports writing fraternity who are making impacts. Specific bloggers covering specific teams (Jon Weisman of dodgerthoughts.com, for example). Fans know them, the local guys. Many of them not sports journalists. Many of them with “real” jobs somewhere else.

There are people like baseball analyst Bill James, now basically co-opted by the Boston Red Sox, who pay him, but whose “Baseball Abstracts” were clever must-read material for baseball fans — and changed the way traditional sports journalists watch the game.

The point being that … not only are newspaper circulations shrinking and staffs disappearing, readers already are voting with their eyeballs and are following guys such as Bill Simmons.

It’s a shift in the way sports are covered. No longer is the guy in the press box or press row the most important conduit between Game and Fan … it now can be a person with season tickets or a serious cable-TV package, no credential and, in theory, no one-on-one access — but plenty of well-articulated opinions — who drives discussions. Who sets the agenda.

This is big. This is a tectonic shift. It’s going on right now. It’s fascinating to see, and a little scary, for those of us for whom “no cheering in the press box” is scripture.

In the future? More cheering. Opinion run amok. Sports journalists writing as long as they feel like writing, as often as they can find sometthing interesting to say.

Maybe Simmons clones all over the Internet. People who won’t bother with talking to participants, because you don’t need that to form an opinion. Who will sell/brand themselves as clever fans, generalists, citizens of the world — rather than professional, often narrowly focused and boringly detached journalists.

This seems to be where the readers are going.

Print journalists, those who remain employed, ought to take note. The best of them need to think about writing more often and getting on their newspaper’s Web site. They should start thinking national and not just regional.

There is competition out there, and it is big and growing stronger.