@daveschwartz So what does this mean for sports media when Deadspin’s the one breaking these types of stories when everyone else was fooled?
— Evelyn Lau (@EvelynTweets) January 17, 2013
My friend and former student Evelyn Lau asked a good question, above. What does it mean for sports media when Deadspin is breaking stories like the Manti Te’o story it broke Wednesday?
Nothing, really, through a narrow lens. Deadspin is a legitimate news-making organization like any other. In fact, probably better than most. It broke the story about small-market baseball teams faking their accounting books. It broke the Brett Favre inappropriate-sexting story.
Through a wider lens, geez, where does one begin?
- The Internet’s redistribution of journalistic power.
- The upside of news organizations that give reporters time to work on meaty stories.
- The comeuppance of news organizations laying off their copy desk. Just imagine if Sports Illustrated and ESPN had enough vigilant fact-checkers who were willing to ask why no one could find the obit for Te’o's girlfriend. Some great professional editors work at ESPN and SI, but you can never have enough bodies on the copy desk. Remember that scene in Almost Famous when the Rolling Stone fact-checker meticulously retraces the steps of William Miller’s story? Yeah, that doesn’t happen much anymore.
You know, Deadspin has good reporters. Sometimes they’re going to get scoops just as the L.A. Times, Awful Announcing, Sports Illustrated, Yahoo!, Sports By Brooks, ESPN, or any other organization is going to get scoops. The National Enquirer gets scoops. The New York Times gets scoops. What does this mean for sports media? In the biggest picture, it means the exact same thing it meant in 1950: some news organizations are better than others. Deadspin is better than most.
Find Dave Schwartz on Twitter @daveschwartz.
