I could write a book about this, but will give you something quick to chew on.
It's about journalism, and I'm not even talking about sports here.
It's important to our democracy that our local and state governments be held in check. Nobody reads the city council report or whatever but it's important that a watchdog is there. Otherwise, our entire democracy could get lost.
The big pubs do this with the federal stuff, but if we lose all local journalism (again I'm talking news, not sports), there won't be anybody to keep our government and community leaders in check.
That's why it's important, IMO. And that stuff takes time and resources.
I'll try to come back to this to give you more later.
Information is becoming like so many other sectors right now. The big ones and the big winners are doing great, but outside of the prestige outlets in New York, Washington, and maybe some second-tier locations like Chicago and Los Angeles (and not even those so much), it is an absolutely brutal industry to walk into right now.
My SIL has a journalism degree from a Top 10 program in the field, but she abandoned it by the time she was 25 and fell back on her teaching certification instead. The pay was nothing, the work was very hard, and jobs were scarce. She gave up.
The way young journalists get into the field is completely different from even a decade ago, too. People used to have to start at the bottom of the totem pole at small, local, regional outfits doing unsexy things like court reporting before they could graduate up to local politics and then onto larger publications in larger cities and start the cycle anew. No young reporters were covering national politics in DC or major financial news in New York -- they had to put in the time to have the experience and perspective to swim in those waters.
Now... you come out of an elite school and hope you can win the lottery and essentially start at the top. If you fail, you go and get a job in banking or consulting instead and forget all about journalism ever interesting you. If you did not come out of an elite school, then there is really nowhere for you to go at all. Time for a different career choice.
You can see these trends (e.g., young journalists given way too much responsibility way too early, all of them having the "perspective" and biases that only a young adult coming out of an elite East Coast school would have, and only being done from a few cities with very little underneath it, etc.) playing out everywhere right now.
These are not even the most significant effects, like you said. The hooliganism the state and local elected officials, prosecutors, cops, and judges are going to get away with without anybody even pretending to watch them is going to be hilarious. Sure, most of the Cave is about a single elected official, but most of our real world interactions with politics and power are on these micro levels, not the macro. But we want entertainment and theater instead of journalism and responsible citizenship, so here we are.
