ESPN and the Sandusky sex case

The SportsCenter I watched this morning didn't even mention the story for 27 minutes. Incredibly bad news judgement.

40-character headline: Child sex, perjury charges at Penn State

 

We're in a similar spot, at about 50 characters give or take for our heads in our stack/waterfall/rail/whatever ESPN calls it. It's a bitch to write those heads.

 

OD: I seriously hope IJAG was kidding about the difficulty level involved in writing a 41-character headline. If that's the bar, raise it. No need to indulge that silliness.
I've thought this for about a decade, but the biggest problem with ESPN is we keep expecting it to be a news station. It's not. So I don't really get all that miffed when they ignore the UM mess or downplay this. I don't expect them to be out front on this stuff.
I expect them to be on camera, screaming, handing off footballs, writing cheesy scripts, wearing Tiger faces, etc. They do all of that exceedingly well.

 

That's what we get, but I expect more. It's just pathetic that SportsCenter buries a story that obviously is a sports story and a very disturbing one at that. It was the first story on NBC Nightly News on Saturday night.

I guess if was Brett Favre instead of Jerry Sandusky, it might be played a little differently?

 

It has the exact same headline treatment now that it had 24 hours ago, with a wire services story and no other coverage. At this point it's pretty clear that ESPN has chosen the cover-up route; I will be interested to see if there's some business connection, such as a special on the life of JoePa and the record, that comes to light as a possible explanation. When they buried the Roethlisberger stuff, it did just so happen to occur on the same day that Big Ben was headlined as one of the main participants on Shaq's ABC reality show.

 

Amen to that. Don't settle for a shoulder shrug and saying, "Can't do better."

I see they're now up to 44 characters, with the headline, "Penn State bars accused ex-coach from campus". Does that smack anyone else as faint praise of Penn State's reaction to this?

I think I'm more offended by the fact that they're still relying on AP the whole way. A story this big doesn't warrant getting some of your own people in Happy Valley to work the story? No opinion pieces (even if written from the columnist's couch) about these horrible accusations and the big picture on what it means to Penn State football/athletics?

Someone else mentioned Brett Favre. I seem to remember ESPN talking heads being on the scene in Mississippi pretty regularly in the last couple years to report on him retiring/not retiring. It's sad that a story this much bigger can't get the same treatment ...

 

Dan Wetzel had a very well-done piece about the story on Yahoo! on Saturday afternoon. It is pathetic that ESPN.com still is leaning on AP for content.

 

It's a huge and incredibly shocking story. Plenty of conjecture and talk value for days. A good news editor keeps it on the home page story list all day and all night.

 

41 characters: PSU AD faces perjury charge in abuse case

That's if you think Curley is the story. And do we need the video icon?

I'm a desk person who has done plenty of online work and SEO work and short headline work. Rule 1: Use the important words.

38 characters: Ex-PSU coach charged in sex abuse case

Also, it's nice that you think there would be no bad night editors at ESPN.com. There are people who are bad at their job at every level of every job.

 

Hello?
Somebody has to ask Joe Paterno ``Once you saw that the Sandusky case was being swept under the rug, did you notify police? If not, why not?''

 

And speaking of silliness, that also implies that the other websites don't rotate stories throughout the day.

I'm not sure the "rotating of stories" was ever the main point of the original post, either. It had to do with the focus of the headline, the downplaying of such a monster story and possibly allowing business relationships to determine how a story is covered. As ESPN continues to just put up whatever they get from the AP without anything deeper or original in the way of content or opinion on the story, I think the final question is being answered very clearly.