A few odds 'n ends in the world of journalism to report...
The New York Times is ending sports coverage and disbanding its sports department.
The Times hasn't had a separate Sports section in several years -- not even on Sundays or Mondays. You might get two pages of sports, toward the back of the Main section or at the back of Business.
The paper will be dropping daily sports coverage, except perhaps for major things like the World Series and Super Bowl. They plan to continue an online sports page that I believe now runs weekly, covering trends and the business of sports.
I guess Sports is no longer "news that's fit to print."
On a positive note, I see that a group of 20 local papers in Maine, including Portland's daily Press Herald, are being bought by the non-profit National Trust for Local News, which looks to preserve local news by finding ways to help local outlets be financially sustainable. The Gates Family Foundation is a big supporter of the group.
I think it's better than having the papers be bought up by Gannett, whose business model seems to be to buy struggling papers, cut local reporting staff to the bone and then fill the paper with pickup of national news from the Gannett chain, with minimal local reporting. I've seen that happen in Westchester/Rockland in New York, where the "local" Journal News is a shadow of what it had been locally. The same can be said of the papers Gannett bought several years ago in northern New Jersey.