Hal McCoy out at the DDN

I grew up in Dayton, and Hal McCoy was just as responsible for instilling the love of the Reds in me as Marty and Joe. He’s a Hall of Famer undeniably, and watching the Reds next year just got less enjoyable.

That’s really sad. Though he’s lucky he’s old enough to retire, rather than try to get another job.

Did it really cost the DDN a quarter of a million dollars a year to send Hal to cover Reds games?

I didn’t grow up with him and frequently disagreed with his points, but agree with your description of his writing. Tough break. I’d feel much worse for him if he was 20 years younger, though.

They just can’t afford the more than a quarter of a million dollars a year to send me coast-to-coast.

They really should consider just keeping the beat reporter at home. The clubhouse stories are nice but if they’re cut in half, the final product won’t be appreciably worse imo.

What I liked about his story recaps was that he really tried to find out what made each game unique. I wish that he had done more with stats but all I really need to remember about his coverage was how much he loved the game.

Hal always replied to emails that i sent him and i consider him a total class act. He will be missed greatly. DDN had an amazing run for baseball beat writers, one which may be unprecedented…

Best wishes to Hal and his family. Bud Selects, diets and cokes, and Hudy’s are clanking your gin and tonic glass this evening, sir.

is the best writer covering this team in any capacity. His opinions may not have always been popular ones, but they were always an interesting read and nobody covering this team can present them better than he can. You’re the best, Hal.

i hope we will continue to see him around

You’ll be sorely missed, Hal. I may not have always agreed with you but I ALWAYS respected what you had to say.

and no, I’m not rubbing it in.

Hal was the only reason to read that gawd awful paper. even though i haven’t read the actual paper in months, i always click to see what hal has to say.

to believe that Hal’s retirement will be the most important event in the 2009 Reds season.

I can’t really feel sorry for him though. He’s of the age that he can retire and enjoy life. However, if he wants another job, it shouldn’t be too hard to find. He does have the words Hall of Fame on his resume after all.

the nights are out on the DDN sports blogs since yesterday? No Ask Hal, no updates from Sunday’s game yet, and nothing from Chick Ludwig on the Bengals front either.

i think Hal took the high road, and was a total class act re: announcing his “retirement”. Nobody believes it was his decision to walk away but he spun it like that to protect his employer. My hunch is that the DDN is a little huffy that Hal announced it in the manner he did (which i thought was tremendous).

Seattle Paper Is Resurgent as a Solo Act

It’s about the Times, but it’s what it says about the Post-Intelligencer that I found interesting:

Oddly enough, what remains of The P-I is also faring better than expected. The Hearst Corporation kept the paper’s Web site alive as a news operation with a small staff, heavily reliant on more than 200 unpaid bloggers who write on things as diverse as their neighborhoods, cooking and marathon running.

Industry analysts called it a long-shot experiment, but SeattlePI.com has kept most of the reader traffic it had as a newspaper site. Hearst will not say whether it makes money, but it says that audience and revenue are ahead of projection.

Then there this:

Lament for a Dying Field: Photojournalism

Newspapers and magazines are cutting back sharply on picture budgets or going out of business altogether, and television stations have cut back on news coverage in favor of less-costly fare. Pictures and video snapped by amateurs on cellphones are posted to Web sites minutes after events have occurred. Photographers trying to make a living from shooting the news call it a crisis.

In the latest sign of distress, the company that owns the photo agency Gamma sought protection from creditors on July 28 after a loss of €3 million, or $4.2 million, in the first half of the year as sales fell by nearly a third.

A lot of pro photographers are irate, because sites like Shutterstock and iStockPhoto.com sell a photo for $.25 when they used to get thousands of dollars. But I think more and more photo editors will turn to such cheap online stock image sites as the economics worsen for publishing.

And for photojournalism, it’s probably worse. News photos are now coming from ordinary people who just happened to be in the right place at the right time, with their cell phone camera or credit-card sized point and shoot. It was a tourist on a sightseeing cruise that captured the moment of impact when that plane and helicopter crashed over the Hudson River.

for the death of small town sports sections all throughout the south, due to the new restrictions on how to cover SEC football games on ESPN channels. (h/t: Doctor Saturday)

The real victims here, as noted above, will be the traditional, small-market media types who actually need to earn a living from game coverage without the assistance of a large-market newspaper or TV network but risk losing their access altogether if they turn to other means.

One could say the same thing about what they’ve done for, well, every other sport, as well.

From a purely academic standpoint, one of the utmost tenants of research is the sharing of information. You allow your work to be borrowed, as long as everyone knows it’s borrowed from you. I think its just too bad that the same doesn’t go for sportswriting: ESPN has its people, and the rest can go to hell.