Saturday, July 15, 2023

"The memories will be so thick, they'll have to brush them away from their faces..."

 
Sad news this week - both the LA Times and the New York Times are making radical changes to reduce their sports coverage. At Defector, Ray Ratto writes The Slow Hemorrhage of the American Sports Desk:
Across the country, papers are cutting back their last deadlines to pre-dinner hours so that the annoyance of night sporting events and their coverage can be eliminated, and the new enemy of profitability is the people who used to fill those pages.
If reducing drag is the heart of efficiency, the Times is the first to give in to the logical extension of this philosophy. If one could be sure The Athletic would actually broaden the Times' coverage, then this move might be defensible journalistically, but The Athletic has never been about reimagining anything. It just tried to out-newspaper newspapers, making writers hope their beats wouldn't suck so that they might get enough clicks to sell enough subscriptions to imagine themselves central to the business. And making the talent worry about the business is always a dangerous strategy, because it allows the business people to fail and blame it on someone other than themselves.
....nobody will remember the business thugs who did today's deed because they thrive in the anonymity of the best hitmen. They might remember some of the people they read and enjoyed and learned from, but that's not what a newspaper is anymore. It's just another way to explain late-stage capitalism: eating the people who do the work and replacing them with fewer and cheaper ones.

This is why I love sports: Read the whole thread - its great. 

 Moving on, some other observations on the passing scene:

Of all the impacts of the pandemic, one that will last is the coming collapse of office real estate -- millions of people learned to love working at home in 2020, and don't want to go back. I thought this was an hilarious idea: When Rick from Pawn Stars was going through Customs, the officer pondered whether his passport was real, and called in an expert to check it out: Its this kind of thing that still makes Twitter unique -- where else would Wierd Al make a comment and get a response from Eric Idle and I get to read what they both say: Finally, this:
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