In cricket, the most nostalgia-sodden of sports, few things are ever as good as they once were. As long ago as 1832 John Nyren, who was raised in the very cradle of cricket, the Bat and Ball Inn on the edge of Broadhalfpenny Down in Hambledon, reckoned that the game was 50 years past its peak. Cricket was at its zenith in the 1770s, Nyren wrote in The Young Cricketer's Tutor, when David Harris, the "best bowler ever known" began his career. It was around then, of course, that the authorities insisted on introducing that monstrous carbuncle on the grand old game, the epitome of gimmickry flim-flam, a third stump. It's all been downhill ever since.

A list of things we can all agree have never been better might look like this:

1) The quality of ground fielding.

2) Err...

The past is perpetually rose-tinted. Pessimism prevails. Fan hands it on to fan. Well, here's another entry for you to consider at No2: cricket-writing. Fans once relied on what they could find in the back pages of the papers or the odd monthly-magazine. Now they are spoiled for choice. Cricinfo, under the enlightened stewardship of Sambit Bal, have just launched The Cordon, "a collection of cricket writing from outside the mainstream media". Then there is Wisden Extra, the lavish and entirely free, online magazine run by Lawrence Booth, and Wisden India, whose website launched last year, with their own Almanack following soon after. Add to that the burgeoning number of individual blogs, from Jarrod Kimber's Cricket With Balls to Jon Hotten's The Old Batsman.

Now there is The Nightwatchman, a brilliant new quarterly magazine available in both digital and print editions. Aptly enough it was launched in the same week that Steve Finn, playing that very role, scored his career-best 56 from 203 balls. Presumably the publishers, in appreciation of this happy omen, made sure a copy of the magazine was back home waiting for him along with the four crates of wine he had been promised by Alastair Cook and Jimmy Anderson.

Guardian readers will know some of The Nightwatchman's contributors from these very pages – Rob Smyth describes the perverse joy he feels when he's following an English batting collapse, another, Andy Wilson, writes about how watching cricket allows him to indulge his hobby as a birder. Others will be well known to any regular readers of the sites I've mentioned above. Chris Ryan from Australia, Firdose Moonda from South Africa, Anand Vasu and Dileep Premachandran from India, and Osman Samiuddin from Pakistan.

The Nightwatchman's editor, Matt Thacker, explains that when he is putting an issue together his team concentrate on "quality of writing, geographical mix, split of cricket journalists and 'outsiders', gender mix, subject range, mix of big names and unknowns."

That shows. The wealth of 'outsider' talent within it is a little overwhelming. There's Patrick Neate, who won the Whitbread Award for his novel Twelve Bar Blues, Bob Kaplan, a maths professor at Harvard, and two historians both named Holland, Tom, and James. The next issue promises to include both Marxist critic Mike Marqusee and stand-up comedian Andy Zaltzman.

The Nightwatchman owes a certain debt to its sister-publication, The Blizzard, which does a similar thing for football. Jonathan Wilson, another Guardian regular, is involved in both. Wilson first had the idea for The Blizzard, he says, when he was pitching "a long, quite complex, story that involved issues of apartheid, race, acid thrown in people's faces, and a possible conspiracy involving the CIA." He couldn't persuade any newspapers to take it. "I genuinely couldn't understand what was going on in our profession," Wilson says. "How could there not be a market for this?"

The Blizzard was founded partly, Wilson says, as a response to "the rush to the middle ground we'd seen in journalism. I understand it – when you're under pressure financially you need readers and hits – but the slavish devotion to search engine optimisation, the desire for interactivity at all costs, the relegation of journalists to quotes-gatherers and comment-generators all seemed incredibly short term." It was a reaction against the culture of 'churnalism' identified by Nick Davies in his book Flat Earth News, a welcome counterpoint to the wealth of pieces updating us on the state of somebody's broken toe, or telling us that a manager has the "full support" of his chairman, or that a player is "committed" to the club.

Thacker says he agrees that it is "a good time for cricket and sports writing". Wilson goes further, and reckons it is "a golden age". He rightly says that "there are more good writers than ever before, writing on a wider range of subjects and in a wider variety of styles." The Blizzard, The Cordon, The Nightwatchman, they are all testament to the truth of that.

Time was when I was the kind of whippersnapper who would say, simply, hallelujah! But, like I said, pessimism prevails and I'm as prone to it as any other fan. It can't all be positive. In a blog for the New Yorker this week Adam Gopnik described how: "It has never been easier to be a writer; and it has never been harder to be a professional writer." His point is that "thanks to the internet, the disproportion between writerly supply and demand, always tricky, has tipped: anyone can write, and everyone does." As Barney Ronay put it in his own inimitable style last Saturday, "Yes: here comes everyone. And everyone, these days, is a football journalist."

Or at least a football writer. Sports journalism needs people who can capture scoops as well as tell stories. And they tend to come from the ranks of the professionals rather than the amateurs. Cricket writing has never been healthier, but cricket reporting is suffering. The county game isn't receiving enough attention. That doesn't just cost us coverage of the Championship. It means that scandals like the gambling ring at Essex or the off-field culture at Surrey could go undetected and uninvestigated. So a balance is needed between the two, old and new, writers and reporters, amateurs and professionals, newspapers and magazines. They're all competing for your time and money, and they're all deserving of your support.

• The Spin has 10 copies of The Nightwatchman to give away to readers. To win one, guess which player Jon Hotten is describing in the passage below, and email it to me on andy.bull@theguardian.com. I'll pick 10 at random at the end of the week.

"His repertoire of shots is limited, his demeanour at the crease stoic. He is quite clearly not a batsman, and furthermore he will never approach those distant foothills of a bowling all-rounder. At the first opportunity, he handed the job over to someone else, feeling, apparently, that his seniority as a cricketer was being impinged upon. In all these ways, he was a perfect nightwatchman."

• This is an extract taken from The Spin, the Guardian's weekly cricket email. To sign up click here.