What Lee Jenkins' LeBron scoop says about our industry

Sheridan needs to lay out more details, his source, the timing etc. for him to claim full credit. I don't know if "LeBron is going back to Cleveland" qualifies as a "scoop" unless there is more context. It can be interpreted as a guess by someone close to the situation without more details. To me, "the scoop" was getting LeBron to say what he did and why he did it.
And I really have a problem with other news orgs dissing the piece or the amount of coverage (the quality? that's another matter), but LeBron's move was a market mover that impacted at least eight teams (Heat, Cavs, Rockets, Mavs, Grizzlies, Lakers, Knicks, Bulls). It was as much of a "scoop" as the various leaks from politicians.

 

Sheridan knew the only way people would acknowledge his existence was a massive gamble. He probably did have a source telling him the comeback was happening, but I doubt that source would've been credible enough for major organizations.

 

Keep turning over a few thoughts on this:

-- A more traditional approach would have been for Jenkins/SI to break the news of this in a straight story but follow it up (minutes, hours or days later) with a first-person essay along the lines of "Why I Came Home." That seems what they were angling for anyway, when they referred to the breaking-news element as a bonus ("winning the lottery").

-- Would this have had anywhere near equal impact if James had decided to re-sign with Miami? Jenkins/SI would have gotten credit for the scoop, but the scoop would have been a lesser story, making it less memorable. Would people have cared as much about the process of getting it? (Sheridan, meanwhile, would have just been wrong.)

-- We can parse the various explainer pieces here, but I tend to think LeBron did not say all the things in that essay, at least not up front without Jenkins' suggestions or input, knowing James would have final approval anyway. Good chance that once James saw Jenkins' version, he thought, "Yeah, what you said."

-- When I do a piece like this, I have the subject read aloud the final draft. Then I can tell everyone with a straight face that, "Yup, that's what he said." He just so happened to read the (my) words, but he did "say" them.

 

That would have been a breach of the agreement.

 

I think it was closer to a quilt. With Jenkins asking questions to elicit points he was curious about (The Decision I, why now, was there a rift in Miami), James answering them (the panels) and Jenkins stitching it together.
This article Jenkins wrote shortly before he won his first ring in 2012 hits on many of the same points addressed in the letter.
http://www.si.com/more-sports/2012/04/24/lebron-james

 

The scoop belongs to Jenkins, period.

Sheridan had info in his story that proved to be false, which may have been true when it was told to him, but he said he was going to make the announcement on his website.

To me, this tells me LeBron's agent was his source and that was probably how he wanted LeBron to make the announcement.

 

Except that Rich Paul approached Lee Jenkins back on July 5?

I'd almost guarantee Chris Sheridan was dealing with a much lower-tier source. That's the freedom of being your own executive editor and publisher.

 

The stature and reputation of the reporter mean as much as that of the source in many cases.

Sheridan's source was obviously right, regardless of his/her place on the food chain, and Sheridan is a savvy enough reporter to have known that.

 

Lee Jenkins writes his own words on LeBron James:

http://www.si.com/nba/2014/07/15/lebron-james-cleveland-cavaliers

 

I think the Deadspin article raised a valid point: Sheridan might have talked to somebody who told him, "LeBron is going back to Cleveland." But other than how the announcement would be made, Sheridan had no other details.

A good reporter is going to get the details behind a decision, because once you say "this decision is made," the first thing people following the story want to know is why the decision was made.

If you can't explain why, then it's not much of a "scoop" to begin with.

 

I meant, Versatile, how this sort of thing used to be handled. We've often seen explainer pieces after a newsy announcement of one sort or another, where a magazine or paper in longform provides the whole back story of some event. Sometimes it's in first-person. I wasn't addressing any agreement in the actual LeBron telling.

Sometimes it's a book (O.J.'s "If I Did It" comes to mind.)

But Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post goes old-school journalism on what he refers to as a "load of crap."

http://live.washingtonpost.com/gene-weingarten-20140715.html

 

Trying to equate the breaking of this story with the breaking of the Biogenesis and Sandusky stories is his biggest mistake.