With J Hutcherson -- What happens to Major League Soccer when nobody is left to cover the games locally? I'm not talking about a club-oriented soccer blog, but actual newspapers producing copy for a mainstream market.
Most of us understand that in a lot of cities they're already using wire clips or stringers to cover games, devoting as little actual resources as possible. That's still a step removed from not getting anything in the paper.
Your guess is as good as mine on how many newspapers are allowed to circle extinction before agreeing to some sort of deal that keeps them printing. After all, you can still buy records, film, and other things that were supposed to go the way of the dodo courtesy of changing technology. You can stretch those particular analogy to cover what gets in a paper that costs more to make for an increasingly smaller audience.
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban gave us with a synopsis of what local market print media means to a club. Quick summary version: it means enough that an owner is proposing clubs pay for coverage.
There are those who treat for-profit newspapers the same way some treat for-profit universities, as somehow beyond the vulgarities of commerce. Most of us get that they're an ad supported business like a lot of others, and, minus a patron, need serious help.
We're past the point with Major League Soccer where there's a soccer-specific beat writer employed full-time by a local paper in every market. That's not likely to revert back to the days when multiple papers were putting MLS writers on the road.
At the same time, the basic value of the web world needs to be questioned. As Cuban works through with the Mavericks, the user numbers for websites begins to fall dramatically when you try to attach a value.
Page impressions feeding ad revenue shouldn't be long for this economy as a business model. Advertising to a site that draws significant traffic from people that will never use your product or places where your product doesn't exist is becoming more of an issue.
To put it in real terms, why should a for-profit newspaper be impressed if a soccer page is drawing traffic from outside the market of the advertisers willing to spend real money? Most newspapers aren't national and most of the primary advertisers aren't either. It doesn't do a local car dealer much good to run an ad on a website that in the best case sends you to your local car dealer in another part of the country.
It makes about as much sense to cover something nationally that, at best, is only really going to matter locally. The web tends to work against that model. Part of that is the need for constant content, well past what even blanket access of a local club would provide.
There's a better than good chance the impact becomes obvious over MLS season 14. This could end up being the print replay of what happened to the independent for-profit soccer sites nine years ago. Sure, there are still independent American soccer-specific sites. None of them are employing multiple editors and writers at full-time rates. The difference in print is that the newspapers will be dealing with more than just a budget line for professional soccer.
Comments, questions, solutions to problems that have yet to present themselves. Please, tell me all about it.
