The Bee wrote something about UCD football? Unheard of!

And today Joe Davidson has an article about Big Sky media day. I put a link to it in the "Big Sky Kickoff 2018" thread...(but here it is again, https://www.sacbee.com/sports/college/article215051045.html )

As print media dies its slow, agonizing death, (and as an old timer, I will miss it,) the Bee continues to get smaller and smaller and provide less and less original news. The same sports section that had the Doss article had only one other article by a Bee writer, in fact the same writer who wrote the Doss piece. Everything else in the sports section was a wire service article. I am not up to actually counting the articles or measuring the column inches, but I would hazard a guess that over 75% of the Bee's content is from other papers and wire services. Most of it has already been posted somewhere on the Internet for a day or two. The food section, the garden section, the movie reviews, are all from outside sources. There is no longer a restaurant reviewer. Unless one of the Kings' players has an ankle sprain, most of the articles in the sports section are from elsewhere. There is no longer a golf column on Wednesdays. Rarely a locally authored piece in the business section. Typical weekly paper is about 25 pages and costs $2.00. I have tried on two occasions to contact the Bee through its website to make changes in my subscription and to date have not received a reply.

But I digress, glad Joe Davidson is still there to provide the last faint echoes of reporting on local high school and college sports.

This is whi newspapers are failing. They no longer employ writers. They buy articles writeen by other publisher's and print them in their own papers. Then the people who buy papers are reading national news and there is very little local news. Hence, local papers are dying. If a newspaper wants to survive they need writers for local news. The editors want to make more money, and they use to find buying articles was less expensive than employing writers, so they gradually phased them out in hopes of continuing to get consumers, using a continuing methods that eliminated local news. It has now come back to bite them in the a**. A quality local paper would survive, but they have become non existent.

Joe D is a gem, but y’all are spot on. Tough to hold a base of readers when the product is full of wire reports that aren’t even local. I saw online that their other reporter, Matt Barrows is leaving the bee too.

I noticed that this year the Bee had interns test fireworks and had interns test food at the State Fair. Sounds like a nice gimmick, but it also suggests that they are using interns for assignments that used to go to full time reporters. Finally got an e-mail from the Bee about my subscription issue. It contained a sentence that would make an editor fume. Didn't make sense and if there was a subject and a verb they did not agree with each other. This morning's Sports section has one (1) article by a Bee writer, and that is just one more twist pointing out that the Kings aren't doing much for the roster during the off-season. Articles about the A's (from the New York Times and the San Jose Mercury-News) and one about the Raiders' announcer (from the East Bay Times.) Nothing on the Rivercats.

Nationwide problem, not just the Bee. Davis Enterprise has challenges, too. We can get free, 24 / 7 news at our fingertips.

Do we turn to citizen journalists like AST?

What happens if many small and large papers fail? Who will check sources?