Los Angeles Times story on fan who broke the news of USC's interest in the Big Ten

What -- if anything -- does this say about contemporary sports journalism, especially newspaper sports journalism?

 

It means, like it always has been, access is key.

I don't know what journalists were supposed to do. A well-connected booster guy tells some random fan stuff. If he's wrong, no one pays attention. Barely anyone is paying attention to him regardless. Do you know how much crap is thrown out on Twitter and message boards that is utter nonsense?

No one with knowledge that this was happening told any reporter. No one had connections that fed them this. Otherwise, how would anybody know? Is that the fault of every journalist covering the Pac12 and Big Ten, every national college guy? Why would you even be asking that question to anyone -- hey man is the Big Ten trying to get USC and UCLA? Whomever got the scoop was going to have to get it from someone on the inside who wanted them to have it and put it out there.

 

We had a former football player in the office who was friends with Ryan Davis. When Davis signed with the Cowboys, he posted it on his social media within minutes of Davis leaving the office. I just sat back right easy and laughed and said "Congratulations, you just scooped the Dallas Morning News and all of NFL media's.…...

 

The late Ronnie Christ was the dean of Penn State football reporters for a couple of decades. He had what we liked to laughingly call "his seven sources." They were a far-flung bunch, from George Chaump to Ernie Accorsi to coaching nomad Vince Hoch to a Harrisburg-area restaurateur/booster who was well-connected. And the amazing thing was how often he was the first to the table with something culled from one of those seven sources.

 

I only think it's an issue if you're *consistently* getting beat when it comes to scoops. It seems like a million years ago, but about a decade ago, I worked on a beat for one weekly newspaper, and we had another weekly newspaper in the coverage area. We would absolutely measure ourselves against them when it came to getting exclusive stories vs. the notebook dump from Town Council meetings, and when it came time for yearly awards. (They went 0-for-the-year at one point, which was delightful for us.) They would still beat us from time to time on a story though. It's inevitable, and I imagine it happens more now with smaller reporting staffs.

 

Man school's fan board has a guy who had some in with the previous athletic department. He was right almost all the time. Now, nowhere near the status of this story, but still interesting and a good source for news within the program. He definitely had stuff local media didn't.

That said, once that AD was gone he didn't have the sources anymore. Funny thing is, that's been years and he still thinks he knows what is going on in the department. He is almost always wrong now. And he just comes off as a know-it-all. I guess it comes as quickly as it goes.

That board has kind of a tight nit group of regular posters and we've discussed how we all know something or know someone and have inside info. It's pretty much true. There is also joking about how the media reads those sites to find news. I mean, everything could be a source. My wife works at the school and there were a few things that happened in the athletic department, not necessarily good, during the summer of COVID and I knew a lot about what was going on just due to her contacts. When it finally came out, a lot of people didn't and still don't believe it despite all of it eventually reported, but it was all true.

The interesting thing here is, what benefits these sources for getting this info out there? Obviously, it is easier to do than going through the media, and they certainly can control the voice more than if it was through a journalist, but what are they getting out of it?

 

You gotta check and recheck. I was tailgating outside Jerry World before USC-Alabama a few years ago. Met a guy from Pittsburgh, a lawyer, who claimed to be connected. He told me that AD Lynn Swann was all set to fire Coach Clay Helton and Bill Cowher was going to be hired as the next coach. You hear that and it kinda makes sense, so you file it away (since I'm not in the media anymore it doesn't matter what I know or don't know).

A couple of weeks ago, somebody on FB said that Malachi Nelson, the No. 1 high school QB in the nation and a USC commit, was backing out of USC and going to Texas A&M with a $15 million NIL deal. Taking his standout receiver with him. I haven't heard a word about that since and no legit sources reported it. The other day, Nelson signed with promotions agency Klutch Sports. A little less validity in this report.

 

It's like a junior version of how The Rock sort-of broke the news of Bin Laden being killed.

https://www.9news.com.au/world/how-...was-dead/95848e24-1e99-497d-9477-1ce52e3643d1

 

A couple of weeks after the Loma Prieta earthquake, I was manning the Saturday morning news desk at the radio station in Vacaville when a lady calls in and tells me her husband is on the crew searching the Cypress Structure and they've found someone alive.

I thank her, hang up, immediately call the San Francisco AP bureau and ask for them to try and confirm it. Instead, the desk person argues with me "that nobody could survive that long" and "we're not going to waste time on rumors." So I'm screwed. I can't go with the story without an official comment EITHER WAY, and AP refuses to give me any idea who's manning the dig site or CalTrans spokesman's phone number.

Low and behold, later that afternoon, there's a huge story on AP -- BREAKING NEWS -- about the guy who was found, with ZERO attribution to me.

I fired off an angry letter to the bureau chief on Monday and got an apology and hearty handshake for all my efforts to actually, you know, help them break a news story.

From that point on, the "cooperative" part of AP was dead to me. I never shared another tip with them.

 

We had a local TV reporter who was revered by the community and his sources. And he spent much of his time in this town taking stories straight from our news pages and reporting it like it was his own scoop, no attribution. I never saw any indication that the public at large knew, or cared, that he did that.

 

That truly sucks and that was (and still is) all too frequent in this industry. And it's only gotten worse with social media/aggregation sites. Stuff that should get attribution doesn't, and stuff that is never confirmed gets passed along as fact.

Why work hard to get a story if everybody else steals it from you as soon as it gets revealed?

In my case, the radio station was paying AP more than $1,000 a month in 1989 to supply us with radio wire, which was about the salary of my part-timer. The least they could do was get off their asses that morning and help me chase the story, which would have benefitted both of us.

The station owner and I sat down after that and discussed dropping wire altogether, but to do so in the contract was more expensive than paying for it. It was something like a renewing three- or five-year deal. AP service agreements back then were sort of the "cellphone plan contracts" of the time.

 

I remember the days of renewing our AP print account and immediately giving notice of nonrenewal because they required 12-months' notice to quit, and we wanted to be able to if we chose.