Real baseball news victim of woeful newspaper industry

ESPN's Jim Caple takes the dead horse "newspapers are dying" chant and chucks it a breaking ball. Baseball fans are seeing less information about their teams because the beat writers that covered them are dropping like John Madden in a jazzercise class.

While the play by play in game stories is usually old by the time it hits the newsstands, Caple notes that analysis and hard news coming out of clubhouses is something that has not been recreated by Web writers because nobody (aside from big media) wants to pay for them.

"On the other hand, and this is very significant, beat writers report news you otherwise wouldn't know concerning injuries, disgruntled players, clubhouse issues, explanations for why a manager did something, team strategies and philosophies, etc. They are able to cull information from sources because they are around people long enough to develop a relationship that is solid enough for the sources to open up."

(Flickr photo by Marcus McCurdy)