Some folks will tell you the world’s best journalism school is in Missouri. For me, that’s true, but it wasn’t at the University of Missouri, which is what those folks have in mind.

More than a few newshounds cut their teeth at Kelly’s Westport Inn, Kansas City’s best-loved Irish bar.

A primer. Kansas City is in Missouri. A state that begins about 16 blocks west of Kelly’s is named after Kansas City. It is called Kansas. Within Kansas has arisen a copycat city that stole the name called Kansas City. But Kansas City, Kansas, is NOT Kansas City. It is something else.

As a fledgling reporter at The Kansas City Star, I passed Kelly’s every night after work. About 1:05 a.m. The law allowed inn-keeps to sell “adult beverages” until 1:30 but let us stay longer with bottles or glasses that had been on the table at 1:30.

At 2 a.m., The Star’s journalists were usually still going. And going. And going … And nearly every minute, we tyros were learning the craft by listening to our elders. And listening. And listening … I earned a degree in journalism three bottles of beer at a time.

Scribes, working and out-to-pasture alike, still yak about our craft. And yak. And yak …

But until the news last week of the collapse of Sports Illustrated magazine, I never heard any speculation that sports journalism might lead a charge into oblivion. I had thought it was a quirk when The New York Times bought The Athletic for $550 million and fired its own sports staff of 35.

That purchase in 2022 set me looking more closely at sports coverage and trying to figure why sports sections and sports staffs have fallen so much more rapidly than other areas of journalism.

Lifestyle sections — I was Canada’s first male editor of a “women’s” section, but we didn’t want a hip name such as “lifestyle” so much as we wanted wider coverage — fell by the wayside long ago, along with much classified advertising. Editorial pages and some specialized sections, such as business, hang on, even thrive, at some dailies. But sports? Going? Who woulda thunk it?

Sports sections were often the first part of the paper that men read. And we turned out miles of copy for them. Joe McGuff, who became sports editor and, later, editor of The Star, covered the Kansas City Athletics before they deserted KC for Oakland. Next betrayal: As to Las Vegas.

Every day, Joe wrote a pre-game story for the afternoon Star and a feature on a player, coach or local star in the city the As were visiting. Every night, for the morning Times, he wrote a game story, plus a “clubhouse” story – this story often features such vapid Q and A as: “Did you think that ball was gone when you hit it, Slugger?” “Yeah, I thought it was gone” — for The Star. Four stories a day. On a typewriter, often teletyped to KC, sometimes phoned in. Word for word.

The economics of sports sections has long mystified me. They had high readership. At The Montreal Gazette in the mid-1970s, newsstand sales rose about 1,500 copies each morning after a Montreal Canadiens hockey game. Surveys told us that people buying single copies had seen the game on “Hockey Night in Canada” but bought the paper to confirm what they had seen.

But sports sections always had low advertising. Tire and hardware stores might buy ads there, but my women’s pages far outsold The Gazette’s sports pages.

Most readers no longer get local game stories from their paper. Yet, the Sun Journal and Bangor Daily News still cover local games. The Sun Journal does it with four writers, the BDN with two.

Most conversations I’ve had about the decline of journalism — I count newspapers, magazines, radio and TV as real journalism, but some news websites, such as ProPublica, present real journalism, as well — revolved around local news coverage.

Tom Stites, a friend who founded the Banyan Project to find new models for newspapers, told me, “The metro daily is dead.” And among metro dailies, only the New York Times thrives on subscriptions rather than on advertising. The Washington Post did well when Donald Trump was president but is slipping. Pittsburgh, New Orleans and Salt Lake City have no local daily paper.

Stites thought local papers could survive, and some have. The paper you’re reading is part of a model of nonprofit journalism that’s working in other places. In Harpswell, The Anchor died, did a Lazarus turnaround and is publishing on a subscription/donation model not unlike public radio.

Usually, when a newspaper fails, nothing takes its place. TV won’t step in. The sad truth remains that most TV news stories are follow-ups of earlier newspaper stories. And, in 18 years, we have lost 2,900 local papers, weekly and daily. In 2023, the rate was 2.5 a week.

What does take place, according to a study I saw a couple of years ago, is that when no reporter is sitting in on council, select board and planning meetings, local taxes rise between 1 and 5% in the first year. So, if your tax bill is $1,500 a year, your taxes would rise between $15 and $75 a year. It won’t take long for your tax increases to cost more than a subscription to a local paper.

Remember that when you get your tax bill next fall.

Bob Neal misses great sports writing, but he gets most of his sports news by being at basketball games — he has attended 52 and counting for this season — and checking ESPN scoreboard sites. Neal can be reached at [email protected].