Use to buy it every week back in high school..1978/81...still have a few copies...

When I was young, my parents used to get me The Sporting News, especially during the baseball season because it would force me to read during summer vacation. My mother was an old schoolteacher who understood that magazines was an easy way to get me to read. I would devour those issues when they came in the mail. I still don't remember how much stuff I ordered out of their classified advertising. It was not renewed in the fall because my parents wanted me to focus more on schoolwork, so the subscription would last till the end of the World Series. They also got me Sports Illustrated, but for some reason, we never seemed to get the swimsuit issue... mother, being an old Baptist girl, did not approve of such things.

I remember reading the sporting news back in the seventies and eighties.   It was great for the box scores and great for the coverage of all the teams.  

Thanks to the internet, we can find all sorts of statistics and articles and bloggers without a physical magazine in front of us.

It's a nice trip down memory lane to review the great history of the sporting news

The Sporting News.... now thats a name ive not heard in a long time

My older brother and I grew up in the '50s and '60s. He subscribed in the '60s, and we devoured every issue. We especially loved the stadium drawings. "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" has a prominent spot on my bookshelf.

Crazy this video popped up and outside my window is the old Sporting News Headquarters.  The building is now lofts but the lobby hasn't changed and its spectacular.

The Hockey News is still around but non-essential, having gone the same route with slick color photos and lacking the team-by-team and league-by-league coverage that made it essential in the pre-internet era.

As a kid my uncle had a small drugstore, in it he sold magazines of all types including The Sporting News. He was a huge baseball fan, and he would let me read his Sporting News when he was done. Fast forward to 1978 (the drug store's gone) I'm 19, I get a job at the steel mill (Gary, In) I got my first apartment, and one of the first things I did was start subscribing to my favorite publications: The Sporting News, The Chicago Sun-Times, Baseball Digest and Time Magazine. Man, I loved my Sporting News! Looked forward to it every week. Go into the 80's, all the mills are laying guys off by the droves, some permanently, including me. The news publications were the first to go. But I held onto those baseball mags. The Sporting News, I held onto that one for about 15 yrs, when they stopped printing box scores, that was it. I even stopped buying it at the newsstand. I kept my subscription to Baseball Digest into the early 2000's (I still have a lot of those). But the arrival of the internet is undoubtably the main reason I and millions of others ceased are subscriptions to (printed) sport magazines.

I discovered this publication around 1973 as a high schooler and subscribed for a few years. Its baseball coverage was without equal. Each MLB team had a beat writer assigned to author that week’s team story and to compile a short summary of other items of note that happened with the team during the week. Those writers were great: Phil Pepe, Dick Young, Jerome Holtzman, Joe Falls, Jack Lang, you name them.

I started reading TSN in 60s as a subscriber and even had it follow me to sleep away camp to keep up with baseball even if box scores were a week or more old...  It got me through college in early 70s until early 80s in my early married days...  One thing I loved were the team by team coverage of baseball teams by columnists from around the country...   Turns out that a number of those columnists also covered golf and in the late 80s I started to be a volunteer at the Players Champonship media center and got to meet many of those columnists that back then used to come to cover the event every spring...  I talked to many of them about how I had been reading them since I was a kid... By then as pointed out, TSN had more coverage of other sports... As it continue to change, I eventually let my subscription die... I noticed that my friend ( also a Lehigh University grad who wrote sports there) Gary Howard was its last editor... I wrote him when that happened about my regret of the loss but it was time.

You are doing a good job dude. These last series of uploads you have done have been AWESOME.
Keep up the good work.'
You are one of the best channels on baseball and cards here

I had the pleasure of working on that building when it was recently remodeled. Two old safes and countless old industrial printers

long time subscriber here ... i don't even want to imagine my life without it.  for sure, before the Internet

I never knew that The Sporting News was an actual newspaper, I thought it was a holding title for annual review and preview editions like Street & Smith or Athlon, or in my neck of the woods Playfair or Wisden. I'm more familiar with TSN publishing books like the Ballpark Book and the Chronicle Of Baseball.
The most obvious example of a sports-only newspaper going nowadays that I can think of is the French paper L'Equipe, published by the organisers of the Tour De France among other things. I've always argued that there should be an English edition.

As a kid in the 60's I read The Sporting News. Wasn't much interested in Sports Illustrated at the time, except for it's cover and featured article. Thought SN's competition was Sport Magazine actually, which I read each month, and I LOVED the photos in that publication. Really also loved the wonderful coverage of the AFL that occured in The SN, as I was a BIG AFL fan.

Everytime he says either "like" or "right," a newspaper dies.

The biggest draw of The Sporting News when I was a kid was that every team got a little blurb. Every season you got a paragraph about your team, which was huge pre internet.

To me, the death of The Sporting News was their switch to primarily covering NASCAR. They needed to do something different and it makes sense to target rural people who might still read a weekly news magazine rather than the internet... But it ended up turning off their long time customer base without replacing them with NASCAR fans.

Fascinating video.  Thanks

I used to buy that paper all the time. It was a good source of information for sports like the hockey newspaper, but everything now has gone to complete social media outlets and you can’t trust it to save your life because nobody’s putting a check on any information going through because most of its bloggers and their opinions

One of the best ever! Great research and informative commentary. You went back to original sources to show something most of us don’t know. Bravo!