greenie said:
I'd treat blogs just like message boards. Never, ever attribute them when it's breaking news. Always do your own reporting, just like if you got an e-mail tip or whatever.
I love deadspin. Read it at least a few times a week. Deadspin needs to stay out of the breaking news biz and be what it is -- an extremely funny sports-related site. You can't dabble in breaking news without reporting. And reporting consists of a lot more than an e-mail address readers can send stuff they've heard.
Well, shirt. I'll break my silence on this, probably to Will's chagrin. Lord knows that I'm frequently e-mailing him and never getting a response. He probably thinks I'm stalking him. And the truth is that I am. I want to have his baby.
Anyway, I went to high school with Will. We didn't run in the same circles, but I have confidence in vouching for a few things. He's not just some blogger. He's a trained journalist. It's not as if he works the smoking section at Denny's and puts the site together on breaks.
I don't know what the reality is. I don't know who his sources are, how he makes editorial decisions or whether he picks his nose and wipes boogies on the spacebar.
What I do know is that:
1. He has a degree in journalism from a highly respectable school and certainly knows the difference between posting rumors and reporting facts. That doesn't mean that he didn't report a rumor; I don't know. It just means that he isn't some blogger without a concept of what journalism is and isn't.
2. He's a fairly smart guy with plenty of professional experience.
3. His site has been a smashing success. He gets tons of hits and doesn't need to post questionable hearsay to gain favor. In fact, I once provided him with some rumor mill stuff and he never reported a word of it or even bothered to follow up on it.
4. He probably makes the ultimate decisions, which means that his work doesn't receive as many critiques as a print guy might expect. So, there is a chance that he'll make a major blunder at some point. (Hey, I have to cover my ass. After all, he could be a robot created by the Hanso Foundation.)
5. He gets a lot of page views from sports journalists, and he's likely to take a heavy hit if he comes out looking like a hack and is forced to retract the Mihlfeld stuff. I don't think he'd take that risk. As for the little disclaimer he put at the end of his story, I didn't see any problem with it. I guessed that it might have been more to appease the parent company's legal team than anything else. But I couldn't really say for sure.
In closing, I saw that Mihlfeld's sister has a blog of her own and that she began to get steroid-related comments from people who learned of the allegations in the Deadspin story. I also saw where Will posted on there that he was sorry that people were posting rude things on her site. Apparently, he had her site linked from Deadspin but decided to remove it. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'd bet a nickel that most bloggers wouldn't have removed the link.
