Rick Reilly: Sportswriter and now Screenwriter!

Rick Reilly, who has won the National Sportswriter of the Year Award more times than I can count, wrote a screenplay about the early days of football 17 years ago. Somehow, George Clooney got hold of it a few years ago, and now LEATHERHEADS is a big time movie coming out on Friday.

I had a great conversation with Rick yesterday - a full hour - and you can hear it commercial-free at this link. One of the subjects we cover is the apparent demise of the newspaper business. This week, it was announced that the newspaper business's ad revenue was down 30% in 2007. That's a staggering drop. Rick says that he has heard that it's possible that there won't be a Los Angeles Times as we know it within a few years.

It is inevitable, in my opinion, that newspapers as we know them will be disappearing in the near future. Technology will mean that there is no paper, no trucks dropping off stacks of papers, no newstands. I think we will evenually have something along the lines of a piece of plastic or silicone, essentially a very thin computer with a touchscreen, and we'll be able to scroll through any newspaper, any magazine, any book we want.

The newspaper business should try to be ahead of this curve. The initiative should be to get content online. That's the only way the business will survive.