Have reports of the death of quality sportswriting been exaggerated?

The last two posts on the B/R Blog have been a little downbeat, so here’s a more optimistic takes on the future of journalism and sportswriting.

Andrew Bucholtz of Awful Announcing asks, Is Sports on Earth’s Demise Another Nail in the Coffin of Quality Sportswriting? The good news here is that Bucholtz follows Betteridge’s Law, which states that the answer to any question asked in a headline is “no.”

Bucholtz takes off from a post by Eric Goldschein on Sportsgrid.com that argued that Sports on Earth failed because it lacked scandal and cheesecake photos. “Plenty of media entities and websites (including this one) have managed to do quite well without regularly checking in on Paulina Gretzky,” Bucholtz writes.

But there is some truth to Goldschein’s argument, Bucholtz admits, pointing to the Robert Littal essay mentioned here yesterday, in which the BlackSportsOnline founder wrote about mixing the two approaches, low- and high-brow. As Littal put it, “You ever consider all those one paragraph posts were done so I’d have an audience to post a 2000 word one and have people pay attention on a serious subject?”

I would argue that this has always been true, and isn’t new with the internet. A lot of the commentary about the difficulty of making online media business models work seems to imagine some time in the foggy, pre-digital past when sophisticated, high-quality journalism paid for itself. It never did. It was always subsidized by less serious content, and by the happy technological accident of the scarcity of distribution. Just about everybody in town read one of the local newspapers, so advertisers paid dearly to get in front of them, whatever was in between the ads.

I worked at newspapers before the internet. We could have called one of the City Council members Daisy Duck in the third paragraph of an important story and we might have gotten a couple of letters a day or two later. But a typo in a crossword puzzle clue, or “McHale’s Navy” coming on at 6 when the TV listings had said it would be “I Love Lucy,” and the switchboards would light up like the aurora borealis. If you paid attention, you knew what sold papers.

Here’s Bucholtz’s conclusion:

The restructuring of Sports on Earth is far from a death knell for the internet media world, and it’s far from an indication that we’re about to descend into a hellscape of “tits, asses and scandal.” However, it does illustrate the difficulties of competing in a crowded media landscape, and the particular difficulties of trying to do so with longform and/or highly original content. Perhaps the solution is to do so in a new way, as sites like The Cauldron and Vice are trying. Perhaps the solution is to change the way longform content is marketed and advertised. Perhaps the solution is to have longform as part of a larger media empire. We don’t really know right now. All we know is that while the old Sports on Earth is dead, the report of longform’s death and the death of quality sportswriting was an exaggeration.