I don't want to turn this into a whither-the-newspaper blog, especially since there are already good ones out there.

But it seems worth noting again at the end of the year that blogs like ours depend most of the time, for links and for information, on the conventional, "mainstream" media-- on writers who get paid to travel to games, to interview coaches and players, to crunch statistics, to report on women's hoops... and America's papers employ fewer and fewer such writers.

Milton Kent is gone at the Baltimore Sun, and Kent's blog hasn't been updated since September. (Nor has Q's blog. Where's Q?) Voepel has a blog (hurrah!) but writes no longer for the KC Star.

The Newark Star-Ledger-- whose sport pages exist online as NJ-dot-com, and who sometimes send reporters to Liberty games (not to mention covering Rutgers)-- this fall announced plans to get rid of almost half its staff. The Detroit papers will cease daily home delivery, partly to avoid cutting even more staff. The Hartford Courant is shrinking alarmingly, too.

Last month Mel Greenberg-- who's still at the Philly Inquirer-- examined the damage the ongoing crisis-in-newspapers has done to coverage of women's sports.

As usual, Greenberg and colleagues have more going on at the Inquirer's hosted blog. If you want newspapers to keep hosting such blogs (and to keep paying the writers who write them) you should consider checking in with them regularly (not just with, erm, us), since newspaper sites can and do keep track of page views: I'm thinking of Greenberg's Philly blog, and of Jayda Evans' blog at the Seattle Times, and of the Courant's UConn blog. What other newspaper blogs should we add to this mix?

If I had a gazillion dollars, the first thing I'd buy would be a WNBA team, but the second might be a serious regional newspaper-- and the next year will probably be a lot harder on the latter sort of business than on the former. Even without bias at sports desks (which I don't mean to dismiss) the ongoing shrinking of newspapers in general will mean fewer resources, and fewer paid employees, covering all sorts of things, from women's-- and men's-- hoops, volleyball and hockey to board-of-education meetings to state-changing rare-coin fraud. Blogs, message boards, sports information departments (who have no interest at all in reporting bad news), and the various arms of the ESPN empire (which looks more like a monopoly every week) might not be able to pick up the slack.