Slightly off-topic: The death of the general sports columnist?

And that’s Ailene Voisin. She has been considered the worst part of the Bee Sports page for years. The others? People like Marty McNeal haven’t landed somewhere yet, but he may yet. He can write when he isn’t saying or doing dopey stuff. Scott Howard-Cooper of SI wrote for the Bee for many years as the general NBA beat writer. He had been writing many quality blog posts on the SacBee blog for many months previous to his departure in March. I think it was all of a week that he had been gone with the Bee that he got a job with SI. The other big columnist of note is Mark Kreidler and he currently is part of the local morning sports talk show in Sacramento. He also has written a few books and written an occasional column for ESPN since leaving the Bee.

The point i’m making? Some of what makes the Bee special is the local access they had, but columnists like Voisin are the worst part of the sports page. They would do well just to have her cover the team and not write opinion pieces. (Believe it or not, she does that really well.)

I understand where you’re coming from, I really do. But this isn’t a bloggers vs. MSM crusade. Nor is it to say that Bullets Forever is better than Sally Jenkins, or that the blogosphere is the new “king of communications.”

It’s simply to say that informed opinion is not medium-based. The whole “columnist vs. blogger/Internet person” division is not really relevant anymore. For Selena Roberts to say that we lose informed opinion by losing print newspaper columns is just silly. The good columnists will adapt and will still be read on the Internet. It’s only the bad columnists who won’t or can’t adapt that will lose here.

As far as your specific process-oriented concerns, let me respond to them one by one.

The columnists also have editors and copy editors and in some cases fact-checkers. Those things matter. There are levels of process that you cannot easily discount

It’s a good point. Two responses:

1. People who write online can and often do also have fact-checkers, copy editors, editors, etc. Those qualities aren’t limited to print columnists. A lot of my stuff gets read by someone else before it gets posted. I try to read every post Jake, Rook or bwoods writes before it gets posted.

2. The editing process, while good, also limits self-editing significantly. I was an editor for my college paper, and I can’t tell you how many times I read an article that had significant copy mistakes and was significantly longer or shorter than it was supposed to be. The writers just felt that the editors would take care of that stuff. It happens in the mainstream too; think about how many times Ivan Carter’s blog entries had copy errors and misspellings. I forget where I read it, but Wilbon once was asked if he’d ever blog, and his response was that he’d be worried that nobody was checking his writing (or something like that). Being good at self-editing is, in my opinion, a huge part of being a good writer. Your self-editing skills will improve when you don’t have a zillion editors to read your stuff.

There’s a reason I look forward to reading a Sally Jenkins column. It’s because Sally has a point of view, is keenly observant, can turn a phrase and knows how to get you thinking about something you might not have thought important. That’s what good columnists do.

If Jake, Rook, Truth, bwoods or I aren’t making you think about something you might not have thought important, then we’re not doing our jobs. We have points of view, are keenly observant, can turn phrases and can make you think. If Sally Jenkins is better than us at that, that’s one thing — she’s very good at what she does and has been doing this for much longer. But Sally Jenkins isn’t better than us because she’s a columnist. Sally Jenkins is better than us because she’s better than us. It has nothing to do with the medium.

Most bloggers I’ve read, even if they’re good on their subjects, aren’t worth reading AS WRITERS — they’re often indulgent, long-winded, and speak to a narrow perspective. The writing is seldom tight. I almost never find myself thinking that an editor and a copy editor and a fact-checker couldn’t be called in to improve something that a blogger has written.

I’ve done writing for print and online, taken classes on it and have been doing it nonstop for several years, and my read here is: writing is like eating a recces peanut butter cup. There’s no “wrong” way to do it. It’s all in the eye of the reader. Maybe my conclusion changes and maybe you disagree, but I don’t see one style of writing as the right way to go. There are obviously some fundamentals that all writers need to abide by, but to say Kelly Dwyer is a worse writer than Wilbon makes no sense to me. They’re just different. Different styles for different folks.

The great thing about the Web is that it doesn’t box the writer in to a certain style of writing. I can tell you, both from experience and from talking to some people in the biz, that a strict word count hurts one’s writing as much as it tightens it. Sometimes, there just isn’t enough substance to fill 800 words, so writers have to stretch their writing to fill the space. That hurts the writing. Sometimes, there’s too much substance for 800 words, in which case you have to cut substance that hurts the writing. The point is, any writer can now write as much or as little as necessary.

There’s a lot of self-congratulation right now among the blogoscenti, and I find it fatuous. Have we gained something? Yes. But we are losing something, too.

This ain’t self-congratulations. I realize this is not a direct response to what I wrote, but I still don’t think too many bloggers are jumping for joy about this development. We all have a stake in having good writers have a voice; it improves everyone. It’s just this medium-based approach to good writing that I reject. The end of general newspaper columnists writing 800 words in the newspaper is absolutely not the end of informed opinion, particularly now that many bloggers and Internet people such as myself and other SB Nation sites are actually gaining the access that was once reserved for mainstream media voices.

Thanks for pointing out the other SB Nation sites with access. BE and BSotS were just the two I thought of off the top of my head.

I will say that I think there are more Adandes than Marriottis out there. The latter category just gets more attention. Then again, DC is home to some of the best sports columnists around (Wise, Boswell, Wilbon before TV, Jenkins, Phil Wood, etc.) so there might be a selection bias here.