Comments on: Independent Beat Writing

By: Darren

Darren — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 19:15:00 +0000

David presented this as a worthy cause and there’s nothing wrong with people pointing out that it’s not particularly worthy as a cause, in their opinions. You can disagree with those people without getting all indignant that they dare consider other causes in comparison to this one.

By: DaveC

DaveC — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:39:35 +0000

Hmm, as a condition, any way we could force him to talk to Dave Cameron for 3 minutes (at 4.9 words/sec that 882 words!) about why Edgar should get in the Hall? Afterall, it does say on the page that he’ll have a vote this year!

By: Circlechange11

Circlechange11 — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:20:04 +0000

“seems” not ‘send’. Geez

By: Circlechange11

Circlechange11 — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:18:41 +0000

Send to me that people just offered their opinions on a subject, as we do in a variety of subjects.

Not everything should be viewed as a ‘line in the sand’. That’s one of the best parts of being a guy … You voice an opinion and move on without holding an emotional grudge for a decade or more.

By: Steven Biel

Steven Biel — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 22:09:28 +0000

OK, so we showed people will give for this. Now, we need to push it into sustainability. Don’t go away Dave–we’re going to need continued buzz to get Mark funded through the season. And when that happens, and we’ve proven that independent, fan-funded beat writing can be sustainable, imagine what’s possible!

By: PhD Brian

PhD Brian — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:08:02 +0000

Yes it does. This money likely comes out of the movie and candy bar budget rather than Haiti relief. You can’t deduct a donation to Zuckerman.

By: Doug Gray

Doug Gray — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 19:34:25 +0000

I simply can’t believe where some of these comments have gone in reaction to this story. If Mark or C Trent decided to ask you to subscribe for $14.99 a year to their website rather than ask for “donations”, not a single person would have brought up Haiti, or homeless people or any other underprivileged or needy group of people.

As for those who are pounding home that their money could be better spent towards a needy cause…. think about that next time you go out to eat rather than cook it at home which would have saved your family 15-20 bucks that could have gone to a needy cause. Of course its a silly way to look at it, but so is blowing a gasket over someone asking for $5-10 “subscriptions” to a website that will fund them going out and doing their job.

It costs money to travel and cover teams. I know how much it costs because I do it during the baseball season as well as many others that post on here I am sure. Advertisments on websites only go so far to covering the costs of operating a place and getting you to places to cover your team. If you don’t want to pay for that, then you are by all means not going to have to do it. But to get all bent out of shape because other people are willing to toss $5-10-15 bucks into a very large hat so they can read internet newspapers seems a bit crazy to me.

By: Johnny Tuttle

Johnny Tuttle — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:00:33 +0000

This is what I fear about the interwebs: in our moving beyond some traditional business models, we’re throwing out the babies with the bathwater. As much as I still buy real cash for real CDs so that I can hear follow up albums, I still buy local papers to get beat writer’s takes on local teams. They don’t equal the analysis here and on the team-specific blogs, but they are a wonderful source of basic daily information about your favorite team. One my first favorite sports sites on the Internet was from 15 years ago: a forgotten Torornto Star subsite listing the beat writers’ work for all MLB teams. Outstanding.

By: Sky Kalkman

Sky Kalkman — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:14:43 +0000

But this is a totally different business model and it sounds like Zuckerman is not an inferior product. This new approach (which has a lot of directions it could go even after the spring training experiment) could certainly fail and be a poor investment for consumers, but people might think it’s worth trying.

Just because newspapers are failing doesn’t mean 100% of their operations are worthless. We just need to figure out which pieces are worth saving and how to implement them.

By: Glanzer

Glanzer — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:14:17 +0000

Interesting. Leaving a winter storm and heading to Florida for over a month to watch and report on baseball seems like a dream vacation to me. If I had the reporting credentials I think I’d go into debt for the opportunity.