Careful, though -- he's very possibly an upgrade.

Just wait'll they hire "Bob".

... and not necessarily one inimical to readers. I personally have never understood the overkill of every single regional rag springing for airfare/hotel/per diem/insurance for a beat reporter to hit every single road series. After all, as we can all clearly see by aggregating all the coverage on the web, not only are the same damn nuggets repeated in every single beat write-up, but many of the beat writers phone it in.

To wax blogotriumphalist, what likely will be adopted as the model is something approximating a blend of the approaches of AN and MediaNews -- hiring/recruiting a local stringer/blogger who is a demonstrated/acknowledged expert on the team with, ideally, a modicum of "credentialized" access.

...they're just covering the game, and know something decent about the players and personalities, and aren't trying to act like a beat writer, then I'm ok with them keeping costs in line.  Nothing wrong with that.

In Vancouver, the local daily newspapers up here are both owned by the same company, and half their content is wire copy from other papers.

They don't have ANY travel budget for any of their reporters, except for the guy covering the Vancouver Canucks beat. He, in turn, puts out about 3 pages of pap a day.

The last Olympics, one of the papers here didn't send any journalists, claiming they didn't have the budget. Then they sent three executives to go watch events as spectators.

Print media is dead. The accountants and marketers have killed it cold.

I pretty much know that the job market in CA sucks, so I'll probably be starting out in Wyoming or some other podunk place after graduation.

But yeah, MediaNews is pretty crappy.

I thought we had those money grubbing capitalist pinned down this time. We will get them next time gang.