As good an argument as I've ever seen:
Bottom line is that despite the huge volume of sports coverage, the local coverage of teams for the most part sucks. There is little depth and certainly not the consistent coverage of a newspaper with a team beatwriter or 2. Thats a bad scenario for sports leagues. Teams in every league need as much local coverage as we can get. The more stories that are written by sportswriters and columnists, the more opportunities for fans to connect and stay connected to our teams.
The natural response of course is to write more on the team website and to create and support local bloggers who write about your team. Which is exactly what most teams do. The mavs have mavs.com, mavswiki.com, friends.mavs.com and we support a variety of different blogs. We have internet and mobile editions and are expanding all the above. The reality however, is that if you count the entire universe of LOCAL Mavs fans that go to these sites, they are a fraction of people who read about the Mavs in the Dallas Morning News and the Ft Worth Star Telegram print editions.
More importantly, those fans that go to the national sports sites, the local team website and blogs are our customers and hard core fans. While we will do everything possible to keep them happy, they are easy to reach. The newspapers reach our hardest to connect to customers, the casual fan.