You might have already seen this in fellow columnist Howie Magner’s Sports Nut offering a couple of weeks ago, but in case you missed it – and to be just a bit more pointed about it – on a huge sports story late last year, the Journal Sentinel got scooped by one of its own outside bloggers.
Bernie’s Crew is a fan blog on the JS website. On Dec. 18, the blog’s proprietor, Jim Breen, was the first journalist anywhere to report the Brewer’s preliminary deal with the Kansas City Royals for pitcher Zack Greinke, a Cy Young Award winner.
Building on the Breen coup, Andrew Wagner at OnMilwaukee.com confirmed the story. Breen followed up with more details, and ESPN picked up the story.
JSBrewers reporter Tom Haudricourt, who was traveling, relayed the two reports in a post of his own that evening and followed up with more coverage the next day.
Now there’s no question that once the news was official, the Journal Sentinel was all over it, bringing to bear all the resources of a major news operation. Furthermore, scoops in and of themselves are more about bragging rights for the reporter or outlet who got there first than they are about service to readers, who probably don’t know or care so long as they get the story quickly and, more importantly, completely.
Even so, the story is yet another indicator of the way the whole news business has evolved – putting, at least for the moment when news breaks, the amateur at a computer on the same playing field as the longtime pros.
It won’t be the last.
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It’s a new year, a new governor, a new legislature, a new Congress, but still your same old Pressroom Buzz columnist. Over the weekend we cleared out some shelves in the basement to make room for a few new items from under the tree. Today we find there are still a few leftovers from the end of 2010 to send your way.
More on “The Lie of the Year”: In comments posted in previous installments, Pressroom Buzz has discussed the difficulty of finding PolitiFact’s “Lie of the Year” (that the federal health care reform bill constituted a “government takeover of health care”) story on the JS or national PolitiFact websites. A diligent reader points out that at least two other PolitiFact franchises, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Austin American-Statesman each has dedicated a Web page to the story. Still, neither at this writing is easy to find from the papers’ respective home pages for their PolitiFact stories.
A must-read every morning in the underground lair basement of Pressroom Buzz is Paid Content, an online media magazine. In recent weeks we’ve spotted a number of news items we’ve wanted to highlight. Here are just two: On how the rise of iPad apps could seriously undercut print subscriptions; and on a lawsuit against aggregator The Drudge Report.
HuffPo profits? A roundup of reports about Huffington Post at 24/7 WallSt. reads the tea leaves on its claims of a profitable 2010 and suggest those same profits “are rather modest and may not be sustainable if the company continues to spend heavily.”
Net neutrality: If you want help sorting through all the claims and counter-claims about the FCC’s “net neutrality” decision last month, a good place to start would be this post at The Rural Blog, operated by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues at the University of Kentucky.
Newseum Troubles: The go-to site for all things Gannett, Jim Hopkins’ Gannett Blog, has reported extensively on financial difficulties at the Newseum, the journalism museum originally bankrolled by the Gannett Foundation’s successor, the Freedom Forum. One wonders if the stories found their way into any of Gannett’s 10 Wisconsin daily papers…
Speaking of Gannett Wisconsin, check out this letter from one of the Appleton Post-Crescent‘s younger readers…
A Reader Asks: “I’ve noticed how carefully the PBS News Hour addresses the issue of its funding sources in its reporting. For instance, when the program was covering the BP oil spill, it let viewers know within every report that oil companies are among its underwriters. Same with its underwriters from other industries whenever news touched upon them. Whenever the Journal Sentinel covers the fight over adjusting the state’s pension funding scheme, shouldn’t the paper be obliged to note that Journal Communications itself used to have a pension plan but eventually froze it? Otherwise, readers might not understand the full context of paper’s reporting and opinion on the issue. After all, the decline and demise of private pension funds is one (albeit not the only) reason why surviving public pension systems are seen as out of line.”
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