The Great Divide: Why old and new media must bridge the gap

Newspapers used to be as much a part of Americana as a slice of apple pie, pickup trucks and baseball. But today newspapers are hemorrhaging jobs and struggling to find advertisers. The Internet gets most of the blame for this phenomenon. Why would people pay for a subscription when they can read most if not all of both their daily local newspaper and national newspapers online?

Furthermore, the classified advertising section that used to be the life-blood of newspapers has been replaced by online forums like craigslist.com. The reason once again, is simple: classified ads charge by the word and craigslist is free. The crisis in the newspaper industry has gotten so bad that even major city dailies in places like Denver and San Francisco have closed up shop.

Yes, it appears frighteningly imminent that the death of the daily newspaper is upon us.

However, there is still a market for news and reporting. It's not that people aren't interested in the news anymore; they just don't rely on the newspaper to get it. Gone are the days that you learned everything that happened yesterday the following morning when you picked the paper out of your driveway or front step and read it over your morning coffee.

By the time the newspaper arrives at your place of residence the late local news has already covered most of the major stories in the paper, and anyone interested in whether the Braves won their game has already found the result on the internet.

The Internet has the immediacy that the newspaper lacks. Good luck finding out about anything that happened after midnight in the print edition of your newspaper.

Nowhere has the division between old and new media been more apparent than in sports journalism. The emergence of blogs like deadspin.com and a plethora of others devoted to more specific niches have left local and even national media scrambling to keep up.

It makes sense when you look at logistically. Most major sporting events are televised regionally or nationally and oftentimes the post game press conferences are televised as well. What qualifies a reporter from a newspaper to cover, report, and wax poetic about a game more than a fan with an internet connection?

Many people view the emergence of blogs as an opportunity for the common fan to voice their opinions and perspectives regarding athletics, no press pass required. In the current tumultuous media climate, where should a young journalist cast their lot?

Tom Keller is a sports reporter for the News & Record in Greensboro. He has followed the traditional route of entering the field of journalism. He began writing for his high school paper and then his college newspaper at Michigan State University. From there he was awarded a summer internship at the News & Record and later returned to the News & Record as its prep sports reporter.

Keller counts himself among the lucky journalists-particularly young journalists-with a job at a major newspaper.

"I am very fortunate, to come out of college at 22-years-old and get a job as a beat writer at a 100,000 circulation newspaper. A lot of things had to happen for that to come together."

Will Brinson, a recent graduate of UNCG, on the other hand has looked to non-traditional new media outlets to build his career in journalism. He writes for several websites about various topics but most notably for AOL's Fanhouse sports blogs. He covers everything from the NFL to golf, from Major League Baseball to tennis, from Fantasy sports to the NBA to college sports. He has also written at one point or another for talentedmrroto.com (a site about fantasy sports), NBA.com and mouthpiecesports.com. Links to his work have been posted on other well-known sites such as Sports Business Journal, the Wall Street Journal, Deadspin, CNNSI and ESPN the Magazine. Suffice it to say, many people have certainly read Brinson's work.

Brinson is positioned comfortably on the cutting side of "new media" in the new media (blogs and websites) vs. old media (newspapers and magazines) divide.

"I think that I'm probably at the elder end of the generational curve that no longer looks at papers and says, 'I always wanted to write there.'" says Brinson. "I didn't always want to write for a newspaper - if anything, when I was younger it was always wanting to write for ESPN.com or Yahoo.com about sports. Which isn't necessarily 'alternative media,' it's just sports information and news coverage on the Internet."

Brinson adds "The Internet wasn't invented to kill newspapers, Al Gore just recognized that it was faster, more fluid, cheaper and could serve the masses much faster. That's why he built it."

Keller realizes that this is a turbulent time to work at a newspaper. When Keller interned at the News & Record in 2006 there were eight sports reporters on staff. Now, including Keller, there are only three.

"It's a strange time for newspapers. In three years it has become a vastly different world, but the heart of what we do is not any different."

In his brief career as a blogger Brinson has covered some extraordinary events and people. For instance he got to ride with Dale Earnhardt Jr. for two laps around Lowes Motor Speedway. He's interviewed the likes of John Wooden, Dwayne Wade and Willis McGahee. He covered the Carolina Panthers-Arizona Cardinals playoff game last January and has worked with and alongside notable media members such as Fanhouse columnist Kevin Blackistone and ESPN College Basketball analyst Doug Gottlieb. He even met with John Daly at the Greensboro Hooters last year during the Wyndham just a few weeks before Daly's passing out incident at the Hooters in Winston-Salem.

He's also broken his share of stories that ended up becoming national news. In the winter of 2008 he pointed out to the world that in the waning minutes of the broadcast of Maryland's win at North Carolina in college basketball one anguished Tar Heel student can be heard telling Maryland's players to "go back to the ghetto." Recently Brinson brought it to the attention of the world that Milwaukee Bucks forward Charlie Villanueva was tweeting during halftime of a game.

Keller, for his own part, has been involved in breaking major local news stories. Most recently Keller and fellow News & Record sports reporter Robert Bell petitioned Northern Guilford High School for e-mail records in order to investigate allegations of recruiting in its basketball program that brought home the 3-A State Title just a few months ago. Before Keller and Bell could even examine the e-mails thoroughly the school's Principal, Athletic Director and Head Janitor-who also happened to be the father of one of the players in question, sophomore Jacob Lawson-resigned.

This story garnered a full post on the highly trafficked blog thebiglead.com-whose founder Jason McIntyre also spent a summer as an intern at the News & Record.

This brings us to an interesting point: should blogs have to pay to or subscribe to media outlets in order to use and link to their information?

"It should be more of a merit system," says Keller. "If you are getting more eyeballs you should get compensated."

Keller also notes that it can is frustrating to see his work re-hashed by a blog only to have it garner more attention for the blog than for his initial story.

"We'll do a story that is in-depth and takes time to put together and then they'll chop from it, or regurgitate what were saying and they'll get a hundred comments," says Keller. "It's so hard to put an article up for free and say nobody else can have this, this is our property. There's definitely some resentment among journalists, you say 'here I'm the one doing the work.'"

Brinson admits that much of the information he posts is generated by newspapers.

"For the straight sports writing type of stuff, it's usually newspapers, because they have the access to players and can get quotes and/or information," says Brinson.

Some people have suggested a subscription model for newspapers online editions. Several papers, including the New York Times, have tried that tactic, to varying degrees of success. But then people simply go to a competing site that doesn't charge to get their news.

"That's one way people have suggested to save newspapers is to have people pay-per-view," says Keller. "But once you give something for free it's hard to get people to pay for it."

Keller has tried to embrace new technology in his position with a blog about high school sports called "the locker room" on the News & Record's website.

"It is a good complimentary piece," Keller says of the blog. "To write a story and then go on the blog and… add another layer to the story, and to ask for what people have to say."

While reader feedback through comments is one of the advantages of blogging because it opens a two-way street of communication, Keller is disappointed in the lack of feedback he has received in that form on the locker room blog.

"Another good thing about it is it has limitless space," says Keller. "It's not constrained by length or time. Everything that you get in the newspaper you hopefully could have known 12 hours ago online."

Though Keller does admit that there is a stigma attached to blogging culture.

"When I think of a blog I think of some guy sitting at home in his underwear ranting about whatever," says Keller.

Brinson notes that even though he is a blogger, he has a day job, so he usually does not work in his underwear.

"Well, I have a day job with an office and stuff, so I have to wear pants, unfortunately, but on special occasions (like the Masters, the Super Bowl, weekends, etc.) I'll take it back to my roots and rock out pant-less," says Brinson. "No, but seriously, sometimes I do blog without pants on."

Kidding aside the decline of newspapers is not because interest in the news has declined. The paper product is merely becoming obsolete in favor of more advanced technology.

"When I look at my friends, it's not like their not getting their information," says Keller. "They aren't walking around with blinders on, there's just a lot of different ways to get it now. I can't see the news gathering process becoming obsolete, but the paper product is certainly not the most current or efficient model and we're just slowly and painfully learning to deal with that. I definitely think you can do what you do in a newspaper on the internet and in a lot of ways be better, if you're just willing to change the way you think about things."

Keller realizes that his career on the printed page will likely not last for very much longer. But he points out that the skills he's gained from the newspaper will eventually be able to translate to another medium in some form.

"They're going to be the same thing pretty soon (print and online). I've definitely resigned myself to the fact that the print product is dying," Keller says. "Whether that's five years or six months I wouldn't be surprised. You have to be realistic. I'm fairly confident saying this job will not carry me through my entire career. But the skills I've learned here and the product that this paper puts out will not be obsolete. Like anything you have to be willing to adapt or you're going to be left behind."

Brinson points out that as technology advances, the chasm between "old" and "new" media is closing. He also notes that though he gets most of his information from blogs, often they are blogs run by newspapers.

" The reality is, at this point, that the line between the two forms of media is much more blurred than it used to be."