Foxsports.com Attribution

How about this by Jeff Goodman of Foxsports.com (who has beaten ESPN's Andy Katz on just about everything recently)..... Give Fox credit - they actually admitted ESPN broke this story on Devin Hardin going back to California. ESPN should take a cue.

http://msn.foxsports.com/cbk/story/6935598

 

Thanks for pointing this out.

I don't know Goodman, but he has grabbed my attention lately for sure. And my level of respect just went up a couple of notches.

From what I understand, Steve Miller, who used to run the SportsLine newsroom back in the day, is now at Fox Sports.com ... and he's as good a news man as you'll find.

 

Standard practice for Goodman, it seems.

 

Don't give Fox any credit for attribution.

Look at Ken Rosenthal's baseball columns. Every news item includes the words "Fox Sports has learned," when 80-90 percent of the time they learned it because someone else reported it first.

It's not Kenny's fault. He's a good reporter and friend of mine, but that is how he is required to write it. It's cheesy and wrong. "xxxxxxxx has learned" should be reserved for scoops.

 

hankschu: Put up or shut up time. Give us, with links, a story in which Fox used "has learned" on a Ken Rosenthal story for news he wasn't breaking himself. Show us Rosenthal's link, and the story another media outlet broke on the same story breaking the news before he did.

 

Keep coming on here and repeating that fiction, and eventually somebody might start believing it.

 

OK, I'll put up.

On May 31, during the early portion of a Mets-Giants game in New York, I reported on my paper's web site that the Giants had traded Armando Benitez to the Florida Marlins.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/31/SPGP5Q5MDJ2.DTL&hw=Schulman&sn=001&sc=1000

The time stamp on my story is 7:33 p.m. PDT, but this is my first writethrough. My original bulletin saying Benitez was traded appeared on the web at 5:04 p.m. PDT (we don't archive bulletins, so I cannot provide the link). The only thing I didn't have in that bulletin was the name of the player the Giants got in return (Randy Messenger), because the Marlins were playing and had not informed him of the deal yet.

Shortly after my bulletin ran online, the The Associated Press followed with a story crediting The Chronicle for saying Benitez was on his way to Florida. My competitor, Andrew Baggarly of the San Jose Mercury News, actually came out with a story the same time as my 5:04 story saying the Benitez deal was all but done. Andy and I even joked about how I beat him by 12 seconds because his story was time-stamped 5:04:12.

About two hours after Andy and I filed, and our game at Shea Stadium ended, we went down to the clubhouse. While I was in the clubhouse, my desk called me and told me this Rosenthal story just moved with the "Foxsports.com has learned" line:

http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/6872914

That one also is not time stamped, but I can say for a fact that it ran after the Benitez trade had been reported on The Chronicle's web site, the Mercury-News Web site and Associated Press.

Again, this is nothing against Kenny Rosenthal. He is a superb baseball writer and reporter, and I consider him a friend. If he and I were competing on the same beat, I am sure he would kick my butt more than the other way around. But I'm pretty sure he did not learn about the Benitez trade before I and the Merc guy reported it. This is a Foxsports issue. They consistently make their coliumists write "Foxsports.com has learned" even when they "learn" things by reading other websites. Kenny himself said he is uncomrtable with it. It is dishonest, but I'm sure Foxsports doesn't care.

Henry Schulman
SF Chronicle

 

Sorry, one correction on my previous post: The link to my story on sfgate is not a writethrough. It is actually a newer version of the original bulletin that simply reflected that the deal which I previously reported as about to happen was formally announced.

 

Not knocking Goodman, not knocking FOX but .... there is this:

Shortly after a published report in the San Francisco Chronicle which said that the 6-foot-11 big man would sign with an agent, Hardin's father, Michael, confirmed to FOXSports.com that his son will return for his senior season.


Change the bolded words to "said" and there is no need to credit ESPN for breaking it.
In fact, "confirmed to...." is ESPNization at its finest and, really, is DeVon Hardin withdrawing from the NBA draft that big a breaking story?
Does anybody outside of the .com competitors care who broke this story?

 

I worked with Steve many years ago and know he continues to be "good people." If there's uncool stuff going on you can believe he's one of the people who's trying to fix it.

 

Excellent point. And the answer is no.

What surprises me is that so many reporters refuse to accept that it's virtually impossible to claim a scoop with this instantaneous news cycle. You report it at noon, someone else reports it at 12:05. And no one knows if someone at some other site didn't really report it at 11:55. Unless the only source for the story is Ricky Williams, and he's hiding behind a tree in Asia, scoops have a shelf life of about 10 minutes these days.

It sucks sometimes, but it is what it is. And no one -- other than the reporters involved -- cares whether someone beats someone else by 12 seconds or 12 minutes.