Capitals Pending Media Blackout Looms

Back when Ted Leonsis bought the Washington Capitals in 1999, he helped actively introduce an antidote to a lack of coverage of his hockey team by introducing the novel concept of allowing bloggers in the press box to chronicle the team in a more in-depth way than traditional media ever did.

At one point, blogs such as Japers’ Rink, On Frozen Blog, Kings of Leonsis, Capitals Outsider, and Russian Machine Never Breaks were go-to reading every morning, along with the Washington Post, Washington Times, and Washington Examiner, giving Washington fans a wide array of coverage of their team.

The move also helped me, first getting a credential in 1999-2000 under WashingtonHockey.com, which led to time with AOL Sports’ FanHouse, the Times, SB Nation, Sporting News, Hockey Writers, and now HockeyHotStove, covering the full spectrum from traditional media to several startups.

But with the Times and Examiner having abandoned sports coverage in the last 15 years, the traditional lynchpin of legacy media in the city could follow suit.

The Post has major issues

It’s no secret the Washington Post’s local coverage has waned in recent years. They folded the Metro section of local news into the paper’s section. Now, the rumors are that massive layoffs could at least severely reduce the sports section, if not wipe it out entirely.

The New York Times reported the Post will not send any reporters or columnists to next month’s Olympics, despite having spent $80,000 on expenses for a planned dozen credentials for the games in Italy. Certainly, a paper with national ambition not sending anyone to a major international competition with tons of casual fans looking for news, despite having invested a sizeable su,m would be a very ominous sign for the entire department.

And the Washington Post is no small chronicler of the Capitals’ franchise history, having gone back to the team’s start in 1974. Robert Fachet was the team’s first beat writer, and to his credit he wrote strong stories despite having seen some of the worst hockey ever played – not to mention Washington’s short-lived white pants – before the Capitals became competitive in 1982, but Fachet knew the team inside and out and regularly reported for the team’s early small but devoted fan base, which then blossomed with the arrival of Rod Langway and playoff appearances.

He covered the Capitals from their first game in October 1974 and for the team’s first 14 seasons, which had a lowlight of a record-worst 8-67-5 campaign in 1974-75, but also the team’s Hall of Fame-laden teams that had turned into a Stanley Cup contender by the time he left the beat.

Storied history

Despite their lower rankings in the Post’s sports hierarchy, the Post assigned some future sports heavyweights to the Capitals beat in the years following Fachet’s departure, both of whom were products of Maryland and fans of the team’s early years.

Rachel Alexander, now known as Rachel Nichols, covered the Caps for the Post beginning in 1996 and was on the scene during the team’s first Stanley Cup appearance in 1998, and later went over to television with ESPN, CNN, Showtime and Fox Sports.

Jason La Caforna, who followed Nichols, went on to make a name for himself after the Capitals beat with his NFL coverage on CBS, came on board in 1999, and covered the team as they began the teardown in 2003 ,which eventually led to landing Alex Ovechkin in the 2004 NHL Draft.

However, despite the strong lineage and coverage over the Ovechkin era, the Post’s coverage has noticeably waned in the last three seasons, with fewer updates and stories for fans to consume after Tarik El-Bashir and a strong crop of young writers followed throughout the 2010s and the franchise’s first Stanley Cup in 2018. There was some extra coverage during the team’s 50th Anniversary season and Ovechkin’s chase of Wayne Gretzky, but the coverage has been sporadic and uneven at best this year, with limited tweets and perhaps one feature-type story daily becoming the norm, far below what fans expected in previous years.

Still, the loss of the Post’s sports section would mean the Capitals would have the dubious distinction of being the first NHL team without a major newspaper’s beat writer, and while that trend has become commonplace at the minor-league level, it would be a major gap in what fans can consume.

Even if the sports section isn’t eliminated completely, the Post has begun winding down other projects, including no longer using a Washington Wizards beat writer, and should the Capitals continue to struggle, it seems natural that the Capitals could be next.

Ironically, the team’s pioneering blog presence has largely faded as the team became more competitive, and while legacy blogs such as Japers, RMNB and Outsider remain in producing coverage, unlike the beginning of the team’s experiment with looking to open the doors to then-nontraditional media, there could be no beat writers to bookend their coverage.

Washington hockey fans could have the NHL’s first media desert in terms of mainstream coverage before the conclusion of this campaign, with the only solution on the horizon for the team to revisit Ovechkin’s early days and bring more non-traditional media back into the box. Without another major local paper having any sort of sports presence, the coverage may be unlike the franchise has ever seen.