Tuesday, June 12, 2012: NYSSWA to cease print publication but stay online

   Leading off today: Jim Nantz and the CBS golf crew love to remind us repeatedly each spring that The Masters is "a tradition unlike any other."

   I'll concede they may have a point when it comes to professional golf, but that's about as far as I'm willing to go in defense of that marketing slogan, because I've indulged in my own "tradition unlike any other" each week during the school year for the last three decades.

   For the last 30 years, I've made the trek down the driveway to my mailbox each Tuesday or Wednesday to welcome the arrival of the weekly New York State Sportswriters Association newsletter. The weekly chronicle of scholastic sports nuggets -- rankings, all-state selections, newspaper clippings, observations from the editor -- some humorous, some biting -- have been a respite from the at-times tedious and ridiculous world of pro and college sports.

   I kept my subscription active even after leaving the world of sports reporting in the mid-1990s to help my employer start up some new-fangled invention called a website. Our purpose back then was to build a site to chronicle the Ryder Cup being played at Oak Hill Country Club outside Rochester in the fall of 1995.

   We had no idea at that time whether people would follow our play-by-play and photo galleries online in the early days of the commercial Internet (they did!) or whether DemocratandChronicle.com would survive once the tournament ended (it did). But it was new and it was exciting, and it was the first step in the latest evolution of how people would consume news coverage.

   Too, it was the beginning of the end for some forms of media and communication. Newspapers and magazines are limping along these days and most will be extinct in printed form in no more than 15 years, with some deserving to die sooner rather than later -- killed off by ownership either too greedy or myopic to adapt to changing technology and retool in a timely fashion.

   Others, however, are making the adjustment and learning how to do more with less. They've put away the fax machines, opened e-mail accounts and bought iPads.

   And that brings us to an important announcement regarding the future of the New York State Sportswriters Association. Longtime NYSSWA editor Neil Kerr announced in this week's edition that we will cease publication of the weekly eight-page newsletter after the last two issues in our 45th year in the business.

   Paid membership in the organization has dwindled to barely a quarter of what it was at its peak, making it impractical to continue printing. I say that not from a financial standpoint (more on that shortly) but from a logistics point of view; it simply doesn't make sense for Neil to assemble the rankings and stories, photocopy them and stuff the envelopes each week when so much of the information is now found online.

   In one fashion or another, we have been putting some of our New York high school sports content online for the last 12 years. We've gotten especially serious about it since 2005, anticipating the day when the announcement would come than Neil was ready to end his Ripken-esque streak of producing newsletters.

   We will continue to operate this website (and related offshoots like RoadToGlensFalls.com) without skipping a beat. Neil will remain the rankings czar for football, boys basketball and lacrosse and will continue to counsel me (including his trademark smark-aleck phone calls on Sunday nights) and consult with our many editors in other sports to keep the process flowing smoothly. Hopefully, Steve Grandin and Perry Novak will also be sticking around for many more years as well, rounding out our core group of content providers.

   I'll continue to run the website and will also do my best to expand the number of sports for which we do weekly

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rankings. We gave boys volleyball a try last fall and there are at least two other sports I'd like to launch for the 2012-13 school year if we can line up some helpers.

   One immediate benefit of our conversion to online-only distribution should be a more timely posting of rankings in most sports. Out of courtesy to readers who've been paying membership dues, I've usually avoided serving the rankings updates and annual all-state teams until Wednesday night or Thursday morning so that many of those receiving the newsletter would get a look at the info before the general public did.

   Though I'll probably still hold off on football rankings and other once-a-week sports until Wednesday, there will be nothing stopping us from releasing the majority of our rankings on Monday and Tuesday to keep them more timely in the case of ranked teams playing early-week contests.

   The other change will be in the world of finances. Though the website is steadily growing both in traffic and revenue, the NYSSWA has operated in the red for the better part of a decade. A lot of the $40 annual membership was consumed by printing and postage costs, leaving less money in the till to pay small stipends to some of our various sport editors who compile the rankings.

   For several years Neil was paying for the last issue or two (or three ...) each summer out of his own pocket. I've been able to help these last few years as more online money has come in, and we've also received some very generous donations via the PayPal link you see over in the right column.

   I haven't sat down with Neil yet to do a budget for next year, but it's almost certain that we'll still operate in the red by a small amount the next two years. I have no reservations whatsoever about covering the cost myself -- I love doing high school sports-related stuff almost as much as Neil does -- although I'll throw in occasional reminders in blogs encouraging small donations from those who might be inclined to help. The goal for now is to turn some modest profits that would pay for technology upgrades (such as a mobile version of the site) and slide a few extra bucks to the people besides Neil and myself who compile rankings.

   To be clear, though, our finances will be fine over the long haul and I look forward to many more years of NYSSWA weekly rankings, all-state-teams, record books and additional content that will keep readers coming back day after day, week after week and year after year.