What is the most heavily subsidized business in America today?
Sports.
What other business routinely blackmails cities, counties and states into building billion-dollar palaces for its use, then giving these over to billionaires, complete with all the revenue, and no accountability?
What other business can control its own press coverage to the extent sports does?
Imagine if Rod Blagoyevich could have enforced something like that!
Yet the biggest subsidy for the sports industry does not come from government, but from journalism.
Every newspaper sports page is a commercial for the teams it covers. Reporters don't actually pay to cover games, the way TV and cable outlets pay to broadcast games, but they are more important than either. Because, as Mark Cuban admitted at his blog this week, they bring in the casual fan.
With local print journalism about to go extinct the industry is losing its connection to the casual fan, who brings with him (or her) an acceptance of all the other subsidies. Without the acceptance of the casual fan, how can cities be blackmailed into building sports palaces and giving them to team owners, or how can university alumni be blackmailed into putting millions of dollars into coaches' pockets in hopes that alma mater will get a mention on ESPN?
Newspapers provide more than coverage to sports. They provide cover. By giving sports prominence alongside government, crime, and Dilbert, they create the illusion that the results of such contests are serious news, and that a championship is "making history." Take away the illusion and it's just a TV show.
Cuban's own proposals on this front are, frankly, pretty lame. Subsidize beat writers through some central authority? And how do these reports then reach the casual fan?
It's not the writing that's the problem. It's the distribution, the wide distribution newspapers provided for over a century. Some of that is held by TV, but local TV news has been losing share as fast as the newspaper industry, and it has been cutting its sports coverage as outlets like ESPN take a greater hold on the imagination.
If newspapers had made better use of the Web we might not have this problem, at least not to as great a degree. We would have it, still, because there are still people who don't go online for whatever reason. But publishers ignored every piece of advice from everyone with A Clue for too long, and now lack the capital to command their online markets even if they had the skills.
The answer, for both sports and newspapers, is the same. Or was. (The cost of doing this goes up every year even while the chances of success decline.) It's a single word.
Directory.
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