Everybody should care about the death of the WaPo sports section

Good morning, and thanks for spending part of your day with Extra Points.

Quick announcement before we get into it. I’d love to publish additional freelance stories on Extra Points and NIL Wire over the next few months. I have multiple work trips scheduled soon, and we have other members of our team taking some time off in the near future … so having additional stories to publish would help us a lot.

For both newsletters, we are seeking original perspectives (which may or may not include original reporting) on topics relating to our coverage areas. Submissions should be ~1,500 words. We pay a minimum of $300 per newsletter, and potentially more, depending on the idea. Please send your pitches to [email protected]. Please do not email me indicating that you’d love to write here without offering specific pitch ideas. I do not have the capacity to serve as an assignment editor at this time.

Part of the reason I’d love to publish additional freelance stories is because I’m hitting the road more often. One of my absolute favorite things about my job is that I now regularly get the opportunity to visit with college students and speak to their classes. When possible, I try to do this in person. Over the past two weeks, I’ve visited classes at Marquette and Penn State in person, Washington and Ole Miss at the NCAA convention and Missouri Western via Zoom. I have trips planned to visit Indiana and St. Bonaventure, among others, very soon.

There’s a self-interest angle to these visits, of course. I’m a small business operator and I’d like more schools to purchase D1.classroom, Extra Points Library and our other products, and shaking hands in person can help with that process. But I’ll visit any school, whether it’s a client of ours or not, if it would help students.

Sometimes I’m invited to lecture on the use of open records in reporting or on the intersection of college athletics and social issues. But I’m also regularly asked to talk about entrepreneurship in media. After all, I didn’t go to journalism school or have a conventional career path into this business, and Extra Points is a successful indie media company.

As more and more institutional media outlets, from newspapers to broadcast companies to larger national websites, continue to cut jobs or close up shop completely, the idea of “going solo” as a newsletter writer or YouTuber has become more and more popular. If there aren’t going to be traditional media jobs anymore, well, shoot, just make your own, right?

And you know what? That is possible, and it’s a path I encourage more and more students to strongly consider. You don’t need a huge audience to make more money than you might earn at what’s left of your local Gannett or Alden Global Capital-backed newspaper. College sports, in particular, is an industry full of unsolved problems that could attract a curious and resilient entrepreneur, in media or otherwise. The founder of the next Playfly, BSN or Teamworks very well could be doodling around a sports management class right now.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post nuked its sports section, along with other critical beats. Hundreds of reporters lost their jobs, in a layoff where the number of affected journalists was larger than the total newsrooms for most remaining media outlets.

For the purposes of our beat, that means that the dwindling number of newsrooms with actual investigative resources has shrunk even smaller. The New York Times doesn’t have a formal sports section anymore (just the Athletic). CBS is laying people off, as did the Los Angeles Times.

You’ve got ESPN, the Athletic, USA TODAY, plus a few individual writers and sport-specific newsrooms, some regional newspapers that are shrinking every year … and then a sea of individuals. That’s almost it.

I wish I could get in front of a classroom of students and tell them that that’s okay, there’s a market inefficiency to be exploited, and niche newsrooms can fully capture the void left behind by unreliable institutional media. But I don’t think that would be the full truth.

There are inefficiencies and niches out there. Extra Points helps to fill some of those, as does Front Office Sports, Sportico, Sports Business Journal and slew of really good independent newsletters (like FOIABall, the Auburn Observer, On Montlake, etc.). There’s room for plenty more peer publications to join us.

But tiny newsrooms just can’t easily accomplish or provide certain things. Legal insurance is crazy expensive for small outlets, which can make more adversarial coverage of the wealthy and powerful much harder to do. Publications with daily deadlines often can’t wall off the time to do lengthy investigations that might not even turn into stories. Travel, software, research … it’s all expensive.

If I knew the magic answer to fix independent media, I’d change my line of work. I’m trying very hard to figure out ways to help others in sports carve out a living. I have suggestions but no perfect solutions.

I do know enough to know that losing WaPo means losing coverage, data and analysis that a lone reporter, a cell phone and a 12-pack of Red Bull can’t replicate. Losing the ability to go deeper won’t just hurt consumers … it will hurt the industry practitioners as well. Everybody needs access to the best information in order to make the best decisions possible.

Without as many reporters kicking up dirt and asking questions…we won’t have that information.

We need independent media AND the sort of outlets who can bankroll lawsuits. We lost an important one this week.

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I’m working on some reporting on a few other stories that I hope will be ready soon. Thanks for reading, everybody, and I’ll see you on the internet.