Then, sportswriting began changing. First, it became police reporting. Now, it has become business reporting. This is not an improvement. It's the age-old problem in journalism of reporters beginning to think like the people they cover.
Police reporters start thinking like cops.
In professional sports, where owners and players think only in multimillions of dollars, sportswriters inevitably pick up the lingo and the mindset. The poetry and romanticism of sports are for saps. Here's an idea to make a lot of money. The fact that a championship-caliber team exists in the nation's smallest professional sports market is the result of independent decisions through the years that came together like a rare alignment of the planets. The two most important were the local decision to make the Green Bay Packers a community-owned team and the decision of the National Football League to share national television revenues equally among all teams.