Problems We'll Never Have

Slow going when your team isn't in the playoffs, right? Not every blog post can be the Internet version of Jason Heyward, after all...

Anyway, I happened across this bit of news thanks to the wags at the Awl, and, well, hell:

Newsday has a new policy for its sports page. The paper’s editors have told their writers there has to be a new, softer tone. They don’t want loaded words. They don’t want name-calling. They don’t want stories to be unnecessarily harsh.

Newsday used to be a tough and punchy tabloid (meaning it was a solid daily paper in tabloid format, like the old New York Post or the current London Independent, not that it was sensationalistic and tawdry). These days it's an indifferent assemblage of the usual horrors: what Maura Johnston at the Awl describes as "charticles and graphsticles and celebrity fluff." Certainly not a unique problem in the dying days of the newspaper industry, but tragic nonetheless.

Now then. Turns out that in 2008 Newsday was bought by some conglomerate called Cablevision. Turns out that Cablevision also owns the Knicks and the Rangers. HMM HMM HMM?

As it happens, your Chronicle has had some fun at the expense of Newsday in the past. Just so you all know: we'll never be needlessly nice to the Thrashers unless we're paid an exorbitant amount of money by the Atlanta Spirit.

But who cares? It is springtime, after all.