Yahoo levels Miami

The Miami New Times has 4 reporters. One, Tim Elfrink, nailed Nevin Shapiro 8 months ago. He told me he started work on Shapiro 10 weeks before publishing a 4,000-word story. In those 10 weeks, he also did 75 daily stories. You could look it up.

 

He did a lot of work, but he didn't "nail" Shapiro eight months ago, as evidenced by the fact that Yahoo "nailed" him the other day. I don't mean to insult him, his story looks good, but the New Times didn't do in the entire U athletic program. Yahoo did that.

Sure, the Herald should have been working on a story like the one the New Times did. It wouldn't have shaken the university to its foundation, though.

 

You guys can blame whomever. It falls on one guy. This was another Rojas Disaster.
They had the original story -- which somebody in the daily staff meeting thought so much of, apparently, they kept it as the lead to his weekly notes column????

After that, it's Rojas' call to devote more time, effort, resources. He chose D, which led to an F.
Somewhat related, I'm a huge Tard fan. I'm surprised he never heard anything.

Regardless, 1HP could have thrown everybody and everything it had at this, and Yahoo still would have drilled them. That's how good Yahoo is.

 

It's interesting to hear that from somebody who worked there. I know next to nothing about Rojas, but know some of the people on the beat and know the folks from all three South Florida papers work hard to cover Miami, they just don't get what they need. That's not to say they shouldn't have had more than they did, but I had to suspect the main problem was above their pay grade.

 

Moving the discussion forward, with the prospect of Robinson/Wetzel coming after the program in your own backyard, what are various local papers doing to make sure they don't their lunches eaten next on such a story?

Moaning about the manpower, money and space limitations? Have fun circling the bowl.

 

I can't honestly see that prospect mattering to 98 percent of newspapers, at least not to the point that they would devote resources to stopping it.

In that light, though, what is the next school to land in Yahoo's crosshairs? I'd say the top five are:

Oklahoma
Georgia
Texas
Arizona State (although that might be too easy with Dennis Erickson in charge)
Oklahoma State

 

Bottom line is, you get a sniff that there's something like this happening, fuck the resources and hours and money and everything else. You go get the story. It'd be impossible to miss this Shapiro guy hanging around if you are paying any kind of attention. If you decline because you are having to do 3 blogs a day, live-feed the game, shoot some video and write a gamer, recap and notes package, then you and your boss deserve to get raked over the coals on this failing. I'm a long way away, but this, to me, is a shocking fail by the Herald.

 

Some of you act like anybody could pull this off.
There aren't 10 papers in the country capable of doing 1/10 of what Yahoo did.
Yahoo handed it to the LA Times with Reggie Bush.
It's what they do.
I loved the Tuesday timing of Yahoo's release, too. My SI showed up today, screaming College Football, obviously without a word on the biggest story in college football.
And ESPN, could you guys ignore this story any more?

Just read Tard. He blames the NFL-NCAA minor league system -- and he's right -- excuses the players because they're poor, the NCAA rules are stupid and don't apply in their ghetto world, and generally wonders why the rest of us aren't as bored with college scandal as he is. Good thing Tard writes well. He wouldn't make a very good Sheriff.

 

To your first point: Examples have already been brought up. The Columbus Dispatch didn't exactly "own" the Tressel coverage, but it shared a big, crucial chunk of it. Hell, at this point, the Ohio State student paper broke more Tressel news than the Herald has done with the Shapiro allegations.

I don't think anyone expects newspapers, aside from perhaps a very, very select few, to produce an all-out investigation like this. But I do think it's reasonable to suggest the Herald should have been chipping away at this story over the past year, which would have forced Yahoo's hand. Yahoo could only afford to break this story wide open with one fell stroke because it knew no one else had it.

To your second point, Le Batard did what Le Batard does. Nothing about his story surprised me. He's been taking the players' side on every issue for 20 years.

 

Kudos to Yahoo, but really -- if you are running The Miami Herald and you can afford 10 blowout investigations a year, do you spend one of them on college sports? I would spend it on something that has impact on readers' lives. That's the big picture.

Unfortunately for the Herald folks, they have to eat it for a while because outsiders got the story, yadda yadda.

When I went to the Herald in flush times, the SE of the place I was leaving said to me, "You do understand that sports is not the star of that paper?" And it was a great sports staff then, but he was correct. Even when money was more than plentiful, like a scene out of "Scarface," the bulk of the discretionary spending was always going to be spent on Shit That Really Matters. They like winning Pulitzers down there, and sports stuff is usually a long shot for one of those.

 

I don't see this as being an investigative breakthrough by Yahoo! that others couldn't achieve. They got Nevin Shapiro to spill his guts and open his bank account and photo album because he was butt-hurt by his former "friends" when trouble arose. That's 80 percent of the story; a dozen leads donated by the very source of the improprieties. Any investigation becomes infinitely easier when a major player decides to cooperate.

Again, the breakthrough is the product of being a seasoned reporter; being there; knowing the personalities surrounding your beat; following the money; working the social engineering tip. "Getting" human nature.

When I was doing an investigation that involved balance sheets (on a much smaller scale, of course), I talked the editor into hiring an accountant and getting the corporate attorney to come up for a couple of days to vet everything and look for other openings that might have escaped me. It was worth every cent. And that was at a 40-k daily.

Imagine what the Herald could have done; instead, it saved a couple bucks and suffered a severe blow to its credibility and relevance.

 

I think this is a fabulous idea, to hire some experts when you know you're outside of your own expertise. That's why I appreciate a newspaper's in-house counsel for newspaper-related issues (libel, First Amendment, etc.), but I would never have them speak to, say, a contract law issue within a story. Or in this case, NCAA issues.