In its quest to maintain the right to call itself “The Worldwide Leader in Sports,” ESPN has turned its gaze to local sports pages.

Over the past couple of years or so, the sports entertainment empire has launched various sites aimed at honing its coverage of major media markets — ESPNBoston.com, ESPNChicago.com, ESPNDallas.com, ESPNLosAngeles.com and ESPNNewYork.com have become alternatives to local newspapers’ reporting. Given this clear attempt to infiltrate the exclusive sphere of papers like the New York Daily News or The Boston Globe, ESPN is trying to become bigger than the back page.

It’s a struggle the network will not win.

“The last thing I want to do is to drive a stake into the heart of an incredibly important industry,” Rob King, ESPN.com editor-in-chief, told The New York Times. “We’re making sure ESPN is doing everything possible to be where the fans are.”

No doubt creating its city sites is a brilliant move by ESPN. The New York media, for instance, is well known for its knee-jerk and impassioned reporting, and the Daily News and the New York Post compete daily to see which newspaper has the most outrageous back page headline.

If you’re ESPN, why not throw some of your own sports writers — including Jets beat writer Rich Cimini, lured from his longtime post at the Daily News by Bristol — into that fray on an everyday basis? It makes sense to allow readers to check up on national sports news and then find their local sports needs in the same place.

But as constituted, these city sites are no match for city papers’ sports sections, longtime staples of sports fans’ routines. There is a comfort factor with local papers people can grab at the deli or on their way to work that ESPNDallas or ESPNChicago can never replicate.

What’s more, these city sites have not been able to draw interest from respected and recognized sports writers who made names for themselves working for local city sports sections, both in print and online. Mike Wilbon writes things when he wants to for ESPNChicago, but he’s been on the ESPN payroll for years as the host of “Pardon the Interruption,” while working for The Washington Post for much of that time. Because of the industry professionals ESPN has hired to write for its city sites, its product naturally continues to be clearly inferior to that of the local newspapers.

Take ESPNNewYork.com, for instance. Wallace Matthews, who covers the Yankees for the site, constantly pontificates about dramatic effects of a particular game, signing or injury, when no broad or dramatic prediction is needed. Across all the city sites, writers swing for the fences with continual columns that combine to do an excellent “Boy Who Cried Wolf” impression.

Recently, Matthews argued that New York’s signing of reliever Rafael Soriano to pitch the eighth inning in front of Mariano Rivera effectively made them World Series favorites and champions of the baseball offseason. I don’t need to explain how ridiculous and unfounded that opinion is.

Ohm Youngmisuk covers the Giants and comes across as uninformed and incompetent — he consistently uses generalities and the same catch phrases over and over and over again. In other words, although I’m sure he works hard, he is not good at his job.

If you browse each of ESPN’s city sites, you’ll consistently find articles and columns that are simply not on par with the local newspapers the network is trying to overtake. Now I don’t know the differences in pay between ESPN’s city beat writers and local newspapers’ beat writers, but isn’t the more respected job to work for the Los Angeles Times and not ESPNLosAngeles.com?

Of course, there’s the argument that newspapers are a dying breed and that sooner or later, all of us will be getting our news, sports and everything else from iPhones and computers and other cool stuff I don’t even know about. But that’s a much broader prediction you either believe or you don’t, and my gut tells me newspapers will find a way to both stay in print and dramatically impact the online forum.

It makes sense for ESPN to improve its brand through its city sites, convenient destinations that give sports fans just a little more to put on their plates. It’s just that the “Worldwide Leader” shouldn’t expect to eventually turn the back page into just another Web page.

Dave Finn is a senior in the College and a former sports editor at THE HOYA. COUCH TALK appears in every other Tuesday edition of HOYA SPORTS.