Sports Columnist Quits, Reason; Newspapers are Dying
In what can be considered a sign that the power of the Internet continues to increase and that journalists, reporters and newspaper and television managers know it, Jay Mariotti decided to abruptly resign from the Chicago Sun-Times because, he believes, newspapers are dying.
Newspapers cannot compete with the web, Mariotti believes, and - if he wants to become more successful - it is time for him to take his business to it.
Mariotti told CBC 2’s Dorothy Tucker: “It’s been a tremendous experience, but I’m going to be honest with you, the profession is dying. I don’t think either paper [Sun-Times or Chicago Tribune] is going to survive.
“To showcase your work … you need a stellar Web site and if a newspaper doesn’t have that, you can’t be stuck in the 20th century with your old newspaper.”
His resignation is quite a problem for the Chicago-based newspaper. He is their star sports columnist. His resignation, and especially the reasons for it, will have caused quite some people working there a tremendous headache.
Mariotti has a point, however. Newspapers are suffering from a loss in sales, less advertisement revenue, and are often not able to bring the news as fast as blogs, online newspapers or online magazines (with that I mean newspapers and magazines that are not available in print, much like this site).
However, bloggers, online newspapers and magazines better hope that newspapers will survive. In the end, they have the best reporters working for them, who are always to find news worth reporting. If websites have to do this entirely by themselves, the entire news industry is in trouble. Additionally, especially blogs feed off news reported by newspapers. Without newspapers, many blogs will disappear.
Of course, newspapers can die while blogs and online newspapers and magazines can still thrive; one can simply negotiate with the Associated Press, for instance, or Reuters, and publish their articles; much like newspapers do today. It would not, however, be the same; online news organizations will have to do everything in their power to break with the current way of doing this. At this moment, such sites react to the news, they don’t act. They report what’s being reported by someone else.
If newspapers truly die, you will hopefully see a radical change among news websites. If not, the public will be less informed than it is know.
A biased media isn’t very informative to begin with. Let them die, perhaps out of the rubble journalists will learn again how to be journalists. I’ll continue to support their failure by continuing to not buy a paper.
There might be more to Mariotti’s resignation than meets the eye.
Jay Mariotti isn’t all that popular in Chicago; in fact, I believe there’s a local website called "Jay the Jerk". A year or two ago there was pressure on the Sun Times not to renew his contract, including from some local sports managers, and for a while it looked like the newspaper was going to give in to the pressure.
Though it could also be the failure of newpapers; the Sun Times is increasingly looking like a tabloid, with big garish headlines on the front page and less news inside. The Chicago Tribune is still pretty true to form but they’re having financial problems as well.
I’m waiting for Jay to annouce his new position with…. say… ESPN or Sport Ill. and I assume it will have a significant on-line presence. Its easy to call something "dying" when you’re leaving. I assume he’s not leaving to write "the great American novel"