I grew up in Lansing, MI. There the newspaper is the Lansing State Journal. Well, today they made the announcement that they would be changing around the print edition of their paper.
Sports will begin on the back page of the Local/State section rather than as a stand-alone section.
Lansing is a “Friday Night Lights“-like town where high school (or “prep”) sports is a BIG thing. In Lansing, Michigan State University sports is a BIG thing. It feels like a bit of a tragedy that these are being relegated to a page or two in the back of the local section of the paper.
Seems like this signals an on coming coming void. Local hometown newspapers are starting to fade away. Who’s going to report local news?
Even in Washington, DC, the Washington Post’s Metro section is pretty piss poor. For local news there, I use blogs like Living In the District, We Love DC, and DCist.
There is a real opportunity for a set of local blogs to rise up outside of the major metropolitan areas, (NYC, LA, SF, DC). Who is going to write the local blog for Cheboygan, MI or Erie, PA? Who is going to write the blog about high school and college sports?
People still need their news. Who’s going to create the news business that’ll innovate and thrive in our current economic downturn?
Oatmeal Stout - Justin Thorp's blog 
Better hold on to your hat. That’s exactly what we mean to do real soon.
Can’t wait to see it bro.
It seems to me that since new media continues to grow so quickly, with print media both disappearing and merging with or morphing into new media formats, the school system should offer (and maybe some of them do already) courses on blogging. So, instead of young aspiring high school journalists working on the local newspaper, they work on the school blog.
I wonder if that is happening anywhere. Could we see blogging/new media being taken seriously enough to be part of school curricula? Most likely kids, by high school age, are already into blogging and/or new media and quite adept at the nuts and bolts of these – so the courses probably wouldn’t focus on “What is a blog,” or “Here’s how to set up a blog in 1-2 minutes on Blogger.com.”
But blogging and new media could definitely be included in creative writing/journalism courses, etc.