When I approached PopMatters about what has turned into somewhat of a revitalization of “Sources Say”, I already had in mind a few people I wanted to talk to about the issues this particular blog was slated to tackle. One of those people was Jason McIntyre, the man behind The Big Lead, a sports blog that also does a pretty good job at keeping an eye on both print and broadcast media.

McIntyre, a former assistant news editor at Us Weekly, started the blog along with his college friend David Lessa in 2006, and has since achieved somewhat of a superstar status within the sports blogosphere. The Big Lead has been cited numerous times on various ESPN platforms, has been profiled by—among other publications—Sports Illustrated and The Chicago Sun-Times, and, on average, welcomes in over two million visitors a month and around 25,000 visitors a day.

So for the man behind it all to take some time out of what must be a busy, busy schedule, and answer a few questions about the current state of blogs, newspapers and the like, is awfully kind. Should you have an extra five minutes to spare sometime within the next day or two, and you happen to love sports, you may want to venture over to www.thebiglead.com. For now, though, the following is the culmination of a Q&A e-mail exchange I was lucky enough to partake in with him about where he thinks this mess we call print media may end up. The following is both introspective and suggestive, and it all comes from someone who really is quite accomplished in the media world.

I will try and do this more as we go along with different individuals from all walks of media. But for now, please enjoy a quick interview with The Big Lead’s Jason McIntyre.

Well, this is sort of interesting. Remember a long, long time ago when a public outcry roared louder than police sirens in Baltimore on a Saturday night about the proposition of bailing out huge, corporate entities? “Oh, no. We just absolutely cannot afford to watch the government give out money to the auto industry time and time again. Those loan companies? Insurance agencies? Goodness, gracious. When will it stop?”

Well, as has been profiled throughout various media outlets recently, one place it isn’t going to stop at is the newspaper industry. Grumblings have recently surfaced that a new bill has been introduced to congress regarding the possibility of bailing out newspapers.

Hmm.

The Newspaper Association of America announced Wednesday that it is cutting 50 percent of its staff and halting the print edition of its magazine, Presstime - a magazine that has done a fantastic job of taking a good, hard look at the ever-so-fickle world of newspapers. The last print edition is slated for May 2009. All is not entirely lost, though, as the NAA also promised that it will continue to publish the magazine in an online form. A total of 39 positions will be cut from the NAA staff.

Great. As if newspapers weren’t getting their own throats slashed enough, now entire associations that dedicate themselves to the industry are dying a heartbreaking death, too. Why don’t we all just cancel our subscriptions today and move USA Today’s Web site into the No. 3 position on the “favorites” feature Firefox so eloquently provides.

Anyways, Presstime recently took the time to speak with various experts on the state of newspapers and where they may be going. The piece itself is highly-informative and certainly worth a click should you have an extra 10 minutes to spend reading about what the hell is happening with print media.

One thing in particular stuck out when reading over some of the answers these experts provided. The following question was posed: “You’re starting a newspaper print product from scratch. What stays, and what goes (sections, beats, days published, classified ads)? How do you rethink the parts you keep?”

One answer stuck out like a lone cloud on an otherwise cloud-less Sunday afternoon. Kenneth A. Paulson, the president and chief operating officer of Newseum, as well as the former editor of USA Today and USAToday.com, offered up some dialogue that is certainly worth taking a look at.

Most newspapers have an extraordinarily loyal core audience that has been doing the crossword puzzles, reading the obits and scanning the stock tables for years. These are generally older readers who will need and read our content for decades. The challenge is to weigh whatever changes you may have in mind against the expectations of this core readership. Yes, you can drop TV listings and replace them with new content to try to attract younger readers, but at what price? Will the gain offset the loss?

That’s a good question, isn’t it?

Why doesn’t a major metropolitan daily give the notion of new content a shot? One of the biggest gripes anyone has with newspapers is its proposed abundance of ignorance toward what it is people gravitate to when it comes to getting their news. It seems as though many publications haven’t taken the time to think about suggestions that could make their print product better. They seemingly ignore that option while spending the majority of their time researching ideas for how to make their online product better.

How about incorporating new features into newspapers that somehow mirror the attributes that attract the readership newspapers get online? There was a time when those aforementioned TV listings were non-existent in print media. It wasn’t until someone came along and thought, “Hey, there is this neat new thing called television and I bet the people who read this publication would like to know when to find what and where. Let’s see what happens if we can help them out by answering those questions with a couple pages dedicated to numbers, times and show titles.”

If print media decided to embrace the online forum more by incorporating certain aspects of the Internet medium into its print product - maybe more interactive features, reader-response forums aside from the customary “Letter to the Editor,” unique, out-of-the box niche section pieces on subjects newspapers haven’t paid as much attention to in the past, etc. - then who knows what could happen?

Paulson brings up a great point when he asks about the gain offsetting the loss. But his question is centered around the notion that newspaper readership has become strictly dependent upon division. He even mildly suggests that the difference between the print media audience and the Internet’s audience is purely generational. That notion doesn’t have to hold true.

It may be hard, but the newspaper can be a universally accepted thing, should publishers and corporations decide to put a little more effort into targeting more than simply just demographics and age groups. Instead, if they concentrate on improving the quality of their paper as a whole - targeting on not one specific group, but merely setting their sights on everyone so to speak - maybe they could begin to answer some of the questions no one has been able to conquer yet.

Sometimes, not everything has to have a price. And if some major newspapers would decide to take a chance on embracing the Web forum through the notion of combination rather than division, maybe the idea that some of the best things in life come free can hold true.

CHICAGO — As newspapers reinvent themselves, high school newsrooms are locked in their own transition amid the economic tumult that has jolted the industry.

Several school newspapers in Illinois, for example, now publish online only, while others are turning to the Internet to post stories edged out of a shrinking newspaper.

These days, the pressures of tighter budgets, thinner papers and slumping ad sales are as central to the lessons of journalism as beat reporting and editing, educators said. “If we want to make it as real world as we can make it, you’ve got to be able to pay for the pages (through advertising). If you can’t pay for the pages, you figure out another way to do things,” said Michael Gordy, adviser to Antioch Community High School’s paper, The Tom Tom.

The ongoing saga that is the Boston Globe vs. the New York Times Company took an intriguing, if not unnecessary turn Friday as workers at the Globe held a rally at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, the Associated Press reported.

For those of you who may not know, the Times Co. is looking for the Globe to face concessions that amount to nearly $20 million in cuts. The Globe, on the other hand, is asking for the Times Co. to share some of those cuts, somewhat lessening the blow the Globe may receive should the Times Co. move forward with their cutback plans. The Globe has recently set a May 1st deadline for the Times Co. to take another look at the desired concessions plan. If the Times Co. doesn’t budge, the Boston Globe runs the risk of shutting its doors after over 130 years of service.

Got all that? Good.

“I daresay that Boston would lose some of its distinction as the Hub without the Globe,” Dorothy Clark, a Globe news copy editor, told the news-gathering service Friday. “It’s been here since 1872. When an institution has had the fortitude to last that long, you don’t toss it out like old news.”

Yeah.

This infighting between two humongous newspaper names is both childish and counterproductive. As if the newspaper industry needs another hurdle to clear, it now sees two of its five biggest names sparring back and forth in front of the public eye. How good could this possibly look to anyone who may still cherish their morning newspaper? It’s as if the industry wants its clientele to give up on them by showcasing some back-and-forth verbal affair that does nothing more than show exactly how stubborn and selfish anyone in the newspaper industry can be.

Sure, it’s reasonable for the Globe to take the stance it has cemented itself in. Nobody wants the fear of death hanging over their proverbial neck after they have been forced to understand how to live with the possibility of non-existence inching closer to its head with each passing second for the past three years. But come on, guys. Does fighting this out in a public forum make anyone feel any better about a medium that has enough problems of its own?

What’s going to happen if this all gets ironed out behind closed doors and everyone comes away smiling? Or, moreso, how about if it doesn’t get ironed out and the Globe is indeed forced to shut its doors? Then what? In regards to the former, your problem is solved, but not without paying the price of looking like children fighting over the last piece of pizza at a middle school sleep-over, forcing observers to classify you as brats. In regards to the latter, not only do you lose an extremely important major metropolitan daily newspaper, but you also look like you are contributing to the death of a form of media that is in dire need of anything but a black-eye-moment.

“We’re not the reason the newspaper business is failing, but we’re willing to do our part to cure it,” Globe reporter Brian Mooney said Friday.

If that’s the case, then do your best to prove it, big-newspaper people. Quit taking your squabbles to the streets and focus more on unity than division. Because if this ship does finally make its way fully under water someday, it’s not going to matter who’s fault it was. In fact, the only thing that’s truly going to matter is the reality that it won’t have a hope of resurfacing in the future.