In sports, there's an advantage to being just that little bit better than everyone else: it's the difference between winning or losing. For musicians, because

In sports, there's an advantage to being just that little bit better than everyone else: it's the difference between winning or losing. For musicians, because the fixed costs of recording an album or planning a concert are so high, paying a little bit more for e.g. a pianist that's a tiny bit better is not a big deal. For quality journalism, absolute performance matters less than performing above a (very high) treshold. It's not like you can distinguish "superb" from "peerless" journalism anyway. Likewise, once you switch to digital, fixed costs melt away and so writing fees and salaries become a more salient expense. One way in which journalism is like music and sports is that stardom matters. You'll still find writers and columnists that earn obscene amounts of money for a single piece of content, because who they are matters as much as what they write. I doubt Roger Ebert has been much affected by the media industry's downturn.