When popular sports columnist Jay Mariotti resigned from the Chicago Sun-Times this week, he explained his decision this way: sports journalism has become “entirely a website business.” He had just returned from Beijing, where he said most of the journalists there were reporting for the web. So now Mariotti is looking to land an online job.
Mariotti’s insight shouldn’t be limited to just the newspaper world. For coverage of pro teams, the web rules, and local TV plays a small and declining role. ESPN.com, Yahoo Sports, local newspaper sites and now the team websites themselves are the primary destinations for pro sports news. And competition is growing in college and high school sports, too. As a result, directly or indirectly, local TV has been shifting its coverage resources away from sports over the years. And unfortunately, with the exception of high school sports, this coverage shift is slowly putting local TV out of the game for sports coverage, both on TV and the web.