Most of the "web is killing writers' livelihoods" rants come predictably from the old guard—established journos at money-losing newspapers who are still under the illusion that written content has intrinsic monetary value. Like a lot of people, journalists confuse "use-value," i.e. the original, well-written and newsworthy article, with "market value," once measured in print advertisement dollars and now determined by the more economically unforgiving page-views. I've written about this before so I don't want to have to break it down again, but because publishing no longer requires a capital-heavy investment (the print press) which paid for itself by giving individual publishers an inherently large market share, the value of written content per se in the internet age has taken a nose dive. Magazines and newspapers now compete with a vast, free and self-published behemoth with millions of unpaid content producers, who sometimes aren't even aware they're producing content at all.

-replace "soccer" with "any subject at all" and this still works, mostly.