Conflict of interest at APSE?

Who signs your check?
Case closed.

 

In theory ...

 

just catching up on all this. i have long been anti-apse awards and such and have no horse in this race. i wouldn't know jenks if i bumped into him anywhere.

but talk about no-brainers: he went to the dark side. he should be out. case closed.

 

I don't think this is worth fighting over. It's like arguing over who gets to have the best deck chair on the Titanic.

 

Wow, lots of opinions on this one.

I wonder though, if one of you complaining happen to win one this year, will you confront your own ethical dilemma and [God forbid!] give it back?

 

I don't mean this to be flip, but ... you're kidding, right?

That disclaimer appears precisely because there is a conflict of interest, and everyone knows it. No, Bud Selig does not review every story before publication. And, yes, 95% of mlb.com stories are the same ones any newspaper would do ... gamers, advances, features, etc.

But, if you believe MLB does not have (sometimes unspoken) influence on what is written, ask a veteran mlb.com reporter with previous experience at a newspaper.

Carry on.

 

Funny you should mention that. We have had one do notebooks for us during spring training in the past, while working for mlb.com as well.

 

All of this hand-wringing over nothing.
APSE is an elitist club and Jenks is one of the boys.
The sooner some people in this business get over the deification of the APSE awards the better.
The same papers and people win all the time because they are part of the network.

 

Bullseye!

 

All the geniuses who keep telling us who the best sportswriters allegedly are, year after year, haven't used that massive brainpower to figure a way out of this industry death spiral. So what does it all really matter anyway? For instance, to me, the best beat reporters don't necessarily have a handful of top stories to show from a season's worth of work. They prove themselves daily, by being the authority in that market, and by doing the brick-by-brick work of covering a team completely. Yet if no player or coach on their beat has a sick family member, a deprived or abusive childhood or a dog that dies, good luck winning an award.

It's almost like the sports editors need the contest for themselves, so they know which APSE-approved grunt to interview for the next opening, assuming they get to fill it at all.

 

The awards themselves are really irrelevant to this discussion. The topic began, true, because someone noticed Jenks being a judge and commented on that. But the issue isn't whether the awards were valid to begin with and have now been tainted, or that the awards were bullshit from the get-go. The issue is whether an employee of MLB ought to be in a decision-making role of any kind for an organization of sports journalists. I have yet to see any philosophical reasoning why he should -- from us, from Jerry Micco or from Jim Jenks himself (who has posted here before). I see people saying he's a good guy, saying he'd never allow his current employment to influence his APSE activity, but I have yet to see anyone specify exactly how allowing this benefits APSE and journalism, how this outweighs the perception of potential harm.

 

If we continue with this line of logic, should we also not exclude those who work for newspaper with ownership interests in Major League teams? McClatchey owns the Pirates, the New York Times owns a portion of the Red Sox. How do we know someone from either chain won't be biased?