What Lee Jenkins' LeBron scoop says about our industry

including Elaine

 

I don't know if you missed the post script in the bottom of the deadspin article but Dave Mckenna talked to Jenkins and this was what he said:

Journalism's latest man of the match, Lee Jenkins, called this evening from Cleveland, where he's continuing coverage of the LeBron James Coming Home Story that they'd broken together earlier in the day via an open letter.

I had emailed Jenkins asking if he felt he could trust himself to cover James objectively after having worked together so closely to break a story that turned out so positively for both of them. And I brought up a case of another writer with the same surname, Sally Jenkins, a once unassailable wordsmith who had trouble getting people to trust her writings after she'd ghostwritten for Lance Armstrong.

Sure, he can remain objective about James, Jenkins said.

Firstly, he sees his case as different from Jenkins/Armstrong in at least one huge way: "There was no money exchanging hands," Jenkins says.

All Lee Jenkins asked from James, he says, was the player's time. And he asks players for their time all the time.

"The way I validate this is: I try to get quotes from everybody I cover," he says. "In this case it was just one extended quote."

As for whose verbiage is in the Open Letter, Jenkins added, he was far more a transcriber than a ghostwriter.

"Nobody needed to hear my subtext," Jenkins says. "They were all his words. It was sewn together, but they were all his words."

Proof? "I don't refer to Mario Chalmers as 'Rio,' he says.

 

A more apt comparison might be the Tom Verducci / Roger Clemens connection

We know how badly that turned out

 

I had not seen that.

If he says so, then he says so. Unless proven otherwise, I guess that's the word.

I don't know why it says, but does not quote him as saying, that he was far more transcriber than ghostwriter. What did he actually say? That sounds like he was ghost writer to some degree.

But then he definitively says they were all James' words.

 

It's really not surprising they're all his words.

 

Lebron should have just used Siri on his I phone then. He didn't need a high priced writer like
Jenkins to transcribe his words.

 

If you approach everything as a skeptic, everything is suspicious, even when you're being incredibly ridiculous.

 

Completely agree with this, and with the bullshit the NYT pulled with the cover of it's section, it's in no position to say anything.

Major sour grapes.

 

As long as the beer is cold and the whiskey is plentiful, you could hold a live reading of Ovid and it would still draw a crowd.

 

Or Death of A Racehorse.

 

Lee Jenkins in his own words as told to Dan Patrick today.

http://www.danpatrick.com/dan-patrick-video-interviews/

 

http://deadspin.com/who-actually-got-the-lebron-james-scoop-1604853768