Couldn't disagree more (at least as an Eagles fan)

It must be bash-Texas week around here, but I thought I'd mention this piece from Texas Monthly that's making the rounds about how they just don't make sportswriting like they used to.  Or, rather, how they don't make sportswriting like they used to in Texas, because really, where else matters? 

The central premise is that today's sportswriters lack the talent with prose that marked their predecessors (dubious statement, but we'll listen), and generally don't enjoy what they're doing.  Thus, they're not as good as they used to be:

A mere fifty years after the golden age of sportswriting in Texas there is not a newspaperman in sight who can write a decent three-martini sports column. These sorts of entertainments were a staple in the late fifties, when I was starting out. You read them in Fort Worth and Dallas under the bylines of chaps like Sherrod, Dan Jenkins, and Bud Shrake and in Houston from the desk of Mickey Herskowitz. The subject could be football, golf, bocce ball, snake charming, lizard racing—weirder was always better....The three-martini column, I should explain, is a mix of attitudes, not alcohols; I don’t know anyone who can write on booze, though many have tried, including several of the aforementioned.

In the footprints of these giants we now find ants. The greats of yesteryear have been replaced by dabblers, hacks, and homers, glorified fans with press credentials that permit them to leech onto some sports outfit, usually their hometown team, and bray or bitch about its wonders or shortcomings in the dead language of statistics to audiences who wouldn’t know an original sentence if one crawled up their nose with a firecracker. The prose styles of these modern knights of the locker room are as bloodless and colorless as old cardboard. They lack entirely the fundamental understanding that if you write about events that repeat themselves into infinity, you must first acquaint yourself with literature.

Right right, so we'll speed through the parts about selective memory, sample bias, all the terrible purple prose that accompanied those stories, etc etc.  We'll even ignore the bit about the "dead language of statistics" (which is apparently necessarily incompatible with any talent for writing).   

Instead, I'll just say that in 2009, I'm positively giddy about the amount and quality of information -- prose especially -- that's available to me as an Eagles fan.  For now, I won't even count all the great free video on CSN or PE.com or the podcasts on the two local sports-talk stations.  Nope.  Don't even need 'em.  We can just talk text. 

As I see it, we've got the daily coverage from both of the local papers on Philly.com -- that would be two writers each plus columnists (the regional papers have scaled back a bit, but we can still scrounge tidbits here and there).  Sure, we snarked a little when Philly.com started making the beat writers pound out blog entries as well (for which I'm sure they all received a hefty raise), but we can't argue with the results: we get details throughout the day, and a chance for the writers to express a bit more of their personality.  For national news with a local twist, we have the now-indispensable Moving the Chains -- it's like our own little PFT Jr. without the wild speculation.  We have the nerd stats sites (FO, CHFF).  We have the national football blogs (PFT, National Football Post, Pro Football Weekly), as well as the humor/ snark sites (Deadspin, TBL, KSK).  And then we have the semi-pro local blogs like GCobb.com, direct access to Donovan McNabb at Yardbarker, as well as the losers in their parents' basements like Derek and yours truly, and the message boards and commenters on blogs. 

"More" doesn't equal "better" just based on volume, of course.  More equals better because of the effects of competition.  To stand out, you've got to be a pretty good reporter, or at least find a specific niche or voice.  Not all of them work, of course (we still have our fair share of blathermonkeys), but net effect is more diversity of opinion and style and, I would argue, higher aggregate quality. 

Fifty years ago?  You had a couple guys typing columns.  Some of them were likely excellent writers.  But they also likely held down their jobs -- unchallenged -- for years and years at a time, with little innovation, fresh perspectives, etc etc.  I bet that got a little dull.  

Thus do I salute you, sportswriters of 2009!  I shall look forward to spilling a martini (or three) on my laptop the next time I read you! 

(Of course, the real losers in all of this are the things that aren't as popular.  College and high school sports get their coverage scaled back; even some of the pro teams.  Luckily for us, we prefer the most popular/ well-funded one.)