Before, as you point out, you have to have a big publishing operation or newsprint operation, that can print large numbers of papers/magazines, and distribute them to a large number of people.

Now anyone can set up a website. The big boys still have a huge marketing advantage, though – I mean the reason we’re even talking about Cowley is because of that. But if you can find a niche and somehow get attention (BP, FJM, HBTs, etc), you can have a successful site.

I’m not sure the demand has changed for baseball writing has gone down, there’s just so much more competition out there, and that’s putting a squeeze on papers.

That’s not even bringing up the classifieds/cragislist/ebay, which was a huge chunk of newspaper revenue that’s just gone now.

Having never seen The Wire and having no plans to, you’ll have to spell out those references a little more clearly for me.

But as you described it, I think that’s largely BS. Even if papers are chasing those stories, they’re still the single-largest newsgathering agency in any area, and bloggers aren’t going to replace that unless they have entrenched sources all over the area. And there are a ton of papers without the budget or desire to go outside their communities, and they’re suffering, too.

Blogs, by and large, aren’t a real replacement for any section of a newspaper. They’re a replacement for occupying leisure time, which is increasingly sparse. IMO, that’s what’s hurting the print product and hurting a lot of other industries—the brick-and-mortar movie theatres, bookstores, record stores, etc. People take their work home with them, commute longer, spend more time in a position where they can’t sit down and read the paper. And when there’s belt-tightening, there’s no real reason to keep a subscription when the equivalent can be found online.

The medium is what’s changing. People get movies, books, music delivered where they’re sitting. People get the news they want to see delivered to what they want to read it on, and so far, there isn’t the money in those that there is in the actual paper version.

Combine that and what Vince said about classifieds - and beyond that, mergers and closings and cutbacks that remove key advertisers from regions - and it’s not a good time right now. IMO, it has everything to do with that, and little to do with how and why newspapers report news. They might have to make some adjustments to find a new fomula, but a lot of the arguments being made against them now were being made 30, 60, 180 years ago. People’s gripes are rarely as novel as people think they are.