But if we start adding general sports writers writing about the Niners like Kawakami, this list could get veeery long, as you would need to add a lot of general NFL writers even if you only include those with Bay area roots and the line would get blurry pretty fast. For example, do you include Nancy Gay and Gwen Knapp then as well? What about Lowell Cohn? Ann Killion? What about Mike Silver? Do you include Jim Trotter, Don Banks? If not, why not? And so on...
Also, the Kevin Lynch/David White beat combo from SFGate is missing as well, those actually do a Niners beat as well.
Anyway, this makes the poll options kinda wrong, I think if we talk about beat writers, it should be Maiocco, Barrows, Branch and then Brown and Lynch/White. For me, those seem to be the guys who are around the team nearly every day, meaning during the season and the relevant parts of the offseason like training camp, free agency, draft etc. That would be a beat writer to me.
I would even think about adding Mike Sando to it who is the ESPN NFC West blogger, because although he does not write about the Niners exclusively, he actually covers them (together with the rest of the NFC West) on a daily basis, which would somewhat fit into what I would expect from a beat writer, although this is definitely debatable a bit.
Even with those five (six) possible options, my vote would go to Maiocco, I still enjoy his writing and his reporting style the most.
But to be honest, I think we should be happy to have what I think is the best group of beat writers of any NFL team. Seriously.
I have looked at different beat writers around the NFL (usually while doing "upcoming opponent research"
) and I think I have never seen the same amount of quantity and quality combined from any other NFL team beat writing group. Either they have one or maybe two good ones, or several crappy ones, or in the worst case only a few crappy ones. 
Sometimes there are local equivalents to "our" Tim Kawakami which is always kinda fun to see, especially since the opinion columns penned by those guys get very similar responses from their fans in comparison to the bay area scribes.
But none I have seen comes close to the collection of great beat guys the Niners have, in my mind.
You could take away Maiocco and although I would lose my favorite beat writer, the Niners would still have excellent beat coverage. You could even take away both Matts and you would still have an upper-echelon beat writing corps in regards of NFL teams as far as I have seen. So I think we are blessed in this regards And trust me in one thing: EVERY SINGLE NFL TEAM has some really stupid, dumb, obnoxious, clueless and rude fans who spew vitriol in every sports comment section available. The topics may change depending on the team, but really, every fan base has those guys, even the winning ones (which makes them slightly more unbearable). We should all be ashamed of ourselves
