I'm someone who reads the paper like the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, who said, "I always turn to the sports pages first, which record people’s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man’s failures.”

Of course, Earl wasn't a Twins fan, but that's a subject for another column. Any sports fan should read Bill King's terrific Sports Business Journal feature, "No News is Bad News: Decline in local coverage pushes sports to innovate."

King surveyed 50 U.S. and Canadian papers with regular, home-and-road sports coverage, and determined:

♦ Collective space and staffing were down 20 percent since early '08.
♦ 48 of 50 papers had reduced travel
♦ Eight papers stopped covering their NHL team on the road, either sometimes or entirely
♦ Four papers stopped covering NBA road trips
♦ Four stopped covering the NFL entirely or on the road
♦ Motorsports and golf "have gone the way of the blacksmith at most papers."
♦ Many papers are skipping premier events like all-star games and championships if the home team isn't involved

On some level, this makes perfect sense. Why should your golf-playing columnist go to the Masters every year when you can't cover your City Council? And what makes your marginal NBA or NHL team more important than your Congressman or Senators?

While there's an argument that papers still devote too much of their dough to sports, I haven't completely thought that one through, balancing societal import and obvious reader interest. (Check the papers' most-viewed stories pretty much any time.)

Anyway, I emailed the two Twin Cities sports editors how their staffing was holding up — particularly, if coverage of the Big Six (Vikings, Twins, Wild, Wolves, Gopher football and basketball) had been cut.

Mike Bass of the Pioneer Press responded first, albeit briefly. "The only thing that has changed so far is Kelsie [Smith] taking over as the primary Twins beat writer. Everything else, we're working through."

Not quite sure what will happen when Kelsie gets a sick day, but I can understand Mike's brevity. His paper just laid off Phil Miller, their top Twins guy but the one lowest on the seniority scale. (Smith is next-lowest, by the way, but the PiPress wouldn't stop covering the Twins.)

[Update: A reader reminds me the PiPress didn't have a reporter on the road trip where Wolves star Al Jefferson wrecked his knee. Where did he read that? In my blog. I lose my keys a lot, too.]

The Strib's Glen Crevier was more expansive. He told me he'd participated in King's survey, and offered these details:

We have had to make some painful cuts in our sports travel budget. But we remain on the offensive when it comes to covering local sports, especially the "Big Six" of Twins, Vikings, Wild, Wolves and Gophers football and men’s basketball.

We have stopped covering some major national events that were once staples for us. We no longer cover the NBA and NHL finals, the NCAA Final Four, BCS championship game, triple crown horse racing events and, this fall, we will not staff the World Series.

Some of these decisions were difficult, because we take pride in the section. But let’s be realistic. It costs about $5,000 to staff the World Series. The games end at midnight. So there’s not much value for our readers having a staff writer there.

On the other hand, we have protected local sports from the impact of the cuts. We did not pull reporters off the road with the Wolves and Wild, or any team for that matter.

We sent Rachel Blount to the Kentucky Derby this year because we had a local owner and horse in the field. (Unfortunately the horse was pulled from the race mid-week). We sent Jim Souhan to Mississippi to profile Brett Favre’s hometown this spring as that story heated up. We have covered both the Masters and the U.S. Open as we prepare for the upcoming PGA. And we went to Knoxville, Tenn., to profile Lane Kiffin, the controversial new coach for the Vols who grew up in Bloomington.

So, while we have pulled back on some national events, we have no intention of slicing into what is clearly our franchise: local sports.

I'm sure the sportswriters themselves might have more details about their increasingly constricted lives, and King's story spends a lot of time demonstrating how sports teams themselves are plugging the coverage holes. That bears more follow-up reporting on my end, but this should at least get the discussion started.