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I grew up on Long Island and worked as a Newsday delivery boy in high school.
One of my neighbors was a Newsday sports writer, and that probably influenced me getting into this line of work.
Headline from the website – “Awful Announcing” – “Newsday sports section facing buyouts, travel cutbacks.”
Terrible news. Growing up, I could not wait to read the Newsday sports section every day.
What a shame.
Don’t know how this will impact the Jets’ beat.
I’m sure they will still cover the Jets, a team with deep Long Island roots and with an enormous fan base in Nassau and Suffolk counties.
The Jets beat has shrunk a little in recent years – the two biggest New Jersey newspapers, the Newark Star-Ledger and Bergen Record, no longer have beat writers covering the team.
Hopefully it’s not shrinking more.
Obviously, the internet has devastated the print newspaper business.
And many fans feel they can get all the free news about the team they need online, on fan blogs, or from sports aggregation sites that take snippets from newspaper content and turn them into stories. These aggregation sites are an underrated factor in the demise of newspaper sports writing. Many people feel okay getting a small appetizer of what the newspaper is reporting from these aggregation sites without having to see the whole article behind the paywall.
In recent years, most newspapers have resorted to paywalls, charging people for their content online.
Some newspapers have managed to weather the storm better than others with successful paywall formats.
But to me, aside from the free content on the internet hurting newspapers, some of the demise is self-inflicted.
Obviously, politics, in a very divided country, have hurt some newspapers. If the paper leans too far right in a left-leaning area, or the other way around, some people will cancel their subscriptions based on what tribe they are in.
From what I hear, from a great source, one thing that hurt Newsday was that people in right-leaning Nassau County have been turned off over the years by the paper leaning to the left, and have cancelled subscriptions.
Don’t kill the messenger on this one. This information came from a source close to Newsday.
But I don’t want to get into politics here. Let’s get back to sports.
If you want people to buy online subscriptions to your papers and go behind the paywall, you need to make it worth their while.
Too much of the sports coverage on beats has become an echo chamber – everybody writing the same stuff.
Why would you pay to go behind a paywall if everybody is writing the same stuff?
And a lot of times, the stuff is not that intriguing.
An example from the spring.
All these stories about how the Knicks’ championship run can serve as motivation for the Jets. Aaron Glenn and players were asked about this, and people wrote stories about it.
Are you going to go behind a paywall for that?
Too many of these newspapers are putting boilerplate stories behind a paywall.
If you want to get people to subscribe, you can’t be writing run-of-the-mill stuff.
Some lost a little respect for “The Athletic” after their recent scandal involving a female football writer and an NFL coach, but to their credit, they do seem to understand that you need to do investigative reporting and think outside the box to get subscribers.
Another issue with newspapers, and this isn’t necessarily Newsday-specific, is their hiring approach to fill beat-writer openings in their sports section.
If you have an opening for, let’s say, an NFL beat job, you should search to find the best damn football writer possible. There should be no other motivation in your search. If you want people to subscribe to your premium sports section online, assemble the best team possible, like in sports, and don’t let anything else impact your hiring process. Unless you don’t care about selling subscriptions, and something else is at work.
There are so many good sportswriters out of work right now – a lot of good candidates out there. If you have an NFL beat opening, go out and get the best NFL writer you can, just like if you need an offensive guard, you would try to find the best one available.
Remember when New York papers would poach really good sports-beat writers from other papers? That doesn’t happen as much anymore. Now they fill these openings in ways that aren’t necessarily conducive to selling paywall subscriptions.
The Newsday announcement is sad.
Growing up, I could not wait to have Newsday delivered to my house (before I delivered it myself), to read its sports section.
July 17, 2026
Premium will return by 9:30 pm (or sooner) on Monday.
