Newspapers Form Sports-Sharing Alliance

At least 49 daily newspapers, most with circulations of 100,000 or higher, have joined a new national sports content-sharing alliance that plans to begin trading stories and columns in September. Among the newspapers that have signed on to the arrangement are The Plain Dealer of Cleveland, the Star Tribune of Minneapolis, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Sports content sharing is not new among newspapers in recent years. The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., began this summer to use baseball game stories from the Daily News of New York, while the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Dallas Morning News have an arrangement in which one paper covers the Texas Rangers and the other covers the NHL Dallas Stars and NBA Dallas Mavericks. Tribune Co. recently began consolidating some coverage of national sports beats within its newspaper chain, particularly between the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune.