I just got the coolest service from MLB.TV. I get an alert whenever the Red Sox score or a fantasy player of mine gets a hit. It's not just a text alert - it's a video. Within 30 seconds of a play, I'm watching it on my Motorola Q.  This costs me all of $4 a month.

I also pay for ESPN Insider, and I voluntarily paid the amazingly detailed and obsessed UniWatch - a blog dedicated solely to sports uniforms. That's right: a site just about uniforms.

My "uniform" number membership card from UniWatch

I get my sports online, and I am willing to pay a premium for speed (MLB.TV's fast video alerts), depth of coverage (ESPN Insider) and even a niche (UniWatch). What I'm not willing to spend a nickel on is an AP sports report posted on every website. The day of a ballgame, all the sites in town post the same game story from the AP. What's that worth to me? Squat.

But at least it didn't cost that much to post the AP copy. Local sports departments have to understand something: it's over. The cozy relationships with the pros, the locker room interviews where nobody says anything, the live shots from an empty field before a game...

Over.

Stop by your sports department some time and you'll see people watching a pro game, logging it, and putting together a reel and a sheet with notes about the highlights. Good gig - no real writing required, and unlike most news, you can cover it from your desk. Worst case? You go to the ballpark, get free food, watch a game and then get a quick soundbite before calling it a night. Fill a minute or two on television and you're done. Who wouldn't want this job?

And who wants to pay for this?

You wind up with the same stuff everyone else has, and you could have got the highlights from a feed. Worse, people like me already know what happened (and now we've seen it on our phones) so you offer nothing new. People are not coming to you for professional sports highlights. Even back in the good old days, only 20% of the audience was interested in sports. Now? It's just vestigial.

But what if we reinvent?

Suppose, instead, the focus of your local sports department was actually local sports. Suppose the sports reporters had to go out and find features about great local stories every day that highlighted athletics and competition. Now you have stories that appeal to non-traditional sports fans. A good story's a good story. Too often we'll get a non-professional sports story and give it to a news reporter.

With reinvention, we bring "journalism" back to "sports journalism."

Now, your reporters are in charge of the site's sports blogs. They post continuously about local sports. They blog about the pro teams, but that's not the focus of the site anymore. People out at local games contribute. The sportscast on-air becomes a summary of what they've been blogging all day. Reading for a couple of minutes on TV isn't the job anymore - it's a very small part.

Right now, the only thing keeping stations from doing this is fear. Sports departments will say "We'll look stupid" if we don't have post-game soundbites. This is absurd. Sports fans, who used to compose the last piece of your audience that watched the segment, now get their sports elsewhere.

It's time to reinvent.

- Steve Safran, Sr. Vice President, Media 2.0, AR&D