This is a milestone in sports journalism. And could be the start of a trend.
The Los Angeles Kings announced today that they have hired Rich Hammond of the Los Angeles Daily News … to cover their team.
Not to work as a publicist. Not to write press releases. To cover the team the way a newspaper […]

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I was at a soccer practice not long ago, and the subject turned (as it so often does in any spare moment at any sports venue), to the print journalism implosion. And all the people who have been fired or will be soon.
We were talking about those still getting paid, and how nerve-racking it had […]

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It looks like it might be a good job. A print journalism job. Titled. Overseas. Maybe a real salary.
The sort of job any of the thousands of print journos thrown out of the business in the past couple of years might find attractive.
The ad is for a pair of openings at the China Daily, an […]

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Espn.com is pretty much the go-to Web site for sports fans. We all know this. Yahoo.com may do some business, attract some eyeballs, and so do cnnsi.com and cbssportsline.com … but espn.com is the gold standard of the industry.
But the site is doing its best to tarnish that reputation … and drive at least one […]

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I rarely comment on items that have appeared in newspapers. I figure you may already have read it and have your own ideas.
But … I was struck, a few days ago, by how the same section (Friday) of the same newspaper (the Los Angeles Times) could have one column so spot-on valuable and fun … […]

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The meltdown in print journalism has produced an unfortunate side-effect:
Diminished newsrooms largely populated by timid journalists.
They might not be timid with sources. (Though I have to wonder.)
What I am fairly certain of is that the print survivors are scared stiff of their managers, and what I believe was the healthy skepticism and byplay of a […]

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Tony Jackson, Dodgers baseball writer, was laid off Thursday by the L.A. News Group.
LANG getting rid of solid, veteran journalists is nothing new. It’s what Dean Singleton’s collection of imploding SoCal suburban newspapers have been doing for more than a year now. The L.A. Daily News, the San Gabriel Tribune, the Long Beach Press Telegram, […]

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I was reading David Sedaris in the New Yorker (how’s that for a snooty start to an item on a sports blog?), and he was writing about train travel a quarter-century ago and the cars in which people were allowed to smoke.
And it brought to mind a memory I thought I may already have written […]

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I like Russell Crowe. If he is in a movie, I’m likely to see it. Or at least seriously consider it.
His current release is “State of Play” in which he plays a not-quite-believable newspaper reporter behaving in not-quite-ethical ways in and around a metropolitan newspaper.
As a thriller with the generic “military-industrial-complex-threatens-democracy” trappings, it’s a middling […]

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Certainly, the bottom has fallen out of the industry over the past year. To the point that some communities have no newspaper at all, and the surviving newspapers are greatly diminished, with shrunken staffs,  circumscribed reach and evaporating influence on contemporary civic debate, great or small.
It was not so 10 years ago, when the vast […]

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