The Washington Post sports department is no more. That really sucks for Nats fans and leaves the Nats coverage in limbo, especially after MASNs dissolution earlier in the year. This begs the question - who is covering the Nationals? I mean REALLY covering them, not covering them like me, giving out free content that's worth the price of admission.
I don't know about local TV stations which will presumably continue their usual light coverages of the team and local sports talk which will continue to talk and interview guys to fill time in the long summer. The Washington Times is unlikely to move from their position of AP aggregator with the occasional Nats column. Jessica Camerato is mlb.com's Nationals reporter and should be fine for game updates but any digging into the team comes with the news from Pravda caveat. The Athletic, one giant grift to earn its founders money while killing off local sports sections, never fulfilled it's "cover every team" promise and seems unlikely to do so. Perhaps though there will be a "DC" reporter - covering all the remaining teams until football season starts. I'm sure Dan Steinberg, former long-time Postie now in a management role over there, is at least considering it.
The best bet though probably is Mark Zuckerman taking things back to his beginnings. He's in a slightly different place now and probably has grander designs given the crash of the Post, but some sort of DC specific site with a dedicated Nats guy feels likely to me, if they can get it off the ground.
Such is the state of Nats coverage. And coverage is important. With no one holding their feet to the fire, with no one holding them at least sometimes publicly accountable, the management of the team can feel a bit freer to do whatever they want, and if whatever they want to do is make this team the Pirates then that's what they'll be.
3 comments:
Yeah there's plenty of coverage out there from guys like you Harper (no offense) who are great at analyzing the numbers, but have zero connection to the front office or clubhouse. Every team needs a couple of those, and they can't be yes men that just write fluff. I think back to the scathing Svrluga article on Matt Williams losing the clubhouse and damn I'm going to miss that type of reporting
I think there is a market for in-depth, daily coverage of the Nationals, but we might have to pay for such coverage until there is enough ad revenue to cover costs. I'd love to see coverage of all the local teams in one place. Harper's coverage is invaluable, but as Cautiously Pessimistic notes, Harper does not have a connection to the clubhouse or the front office.
The problem here, as in so many areas of the media, is that reporting is slow and expensive and uncertain and that punditry flows free from the tap. (Sometimes literally free like Harper's posts, but even when someone gets $300k a year for a weekly column, that's way more content at considerably less cost than you would ever get from actual reporting.)
Even worse, at least on short timeframes, the punditry probably actually drives more engagement and actually is higher value content from the POV of the media business.
On longer timeframes, of course, the ecosystem breaks and there's no value to be had anywhere. Without the reporting infrastructure to hold everything up, the paper is going to collapse like Forbes and Newsweek and so many others have. It's wild to me how shortsighted capital (by which I mean the aggregate of the people who control it) often is. Even on their own terms, they are just so stupid and so reckless so much of the time.
Post a Comment