ESPN and the Sandusky sex case

ESPN partner ABC News just led off its evening news with this story, and one of its reporters went to Sandusky's house and asked him questions. He seemed nice, but didn't answer questions based on advise of his attorney. Given the chance to say the charges were false, he declined.

 

No matter the situation, one would be incredibly stupid to speak to reporters after being charged with a crime. You have nothing to gain. Even if you're being truthful about denying it, no one will believe you. All you can do is say something foolish the prosecutor can hold against you later. Best to let your attorney handle any communication.

 

Hate to say I called it, but, "See Spot run" journalism at its finest ...

 

JoeLa is absolutely correct about JoePa. If this isn't the first question on Tuesday's Big Ten teleconference, the questioner should be fired.

 

I think it's pretty much accepted these days that Yahoo! Sports is yards ahead of the journalism curve than ESPN will ever be. That should be nothing new.

To the poster who said you can't take anything ESPN does seriously these days? That's right on.

 

But, they're comfortable in their own skin.

 

I have to agree with everything SF has said so far

 

Yahoo runs laps around ESPN in sports journalism. ESPN has other interests. End of story.

 

Since everything I wrote has been mischaracterized ...

A.) I know there are no bad night editors at ESPN.com because unless there has been MASSIVE turnover, I worked with every freaking one of them 18 months ago.
B.) Saying ESPN rotates its stories ISN'T saying the others don't. It's saying when you have one main story spot and it has to be used to promo a game during live action, then yes, that big story has to come down. David Stern could have died, but LSU-Alabama would have been in that main spot.
C.) The point I made about the headlines stands. There's a tone to hit there, and YES you have to have the video icon. You don't even choose to use it. It's automatic. So yes, could the headline have been better? Absolutely. It always can be. But the OP (or whomever I was responding to back then) offered up a like 12-word headline as how it was done elsewhere and should have been done here. I was MERELY pointing out that that wouldn't work in that spot.



ALSO to clarify: I'm not blindly defending ESPN here. Hell, you can ask my ex-boss how many decisions that were made there I didn't agree with. But it's so easy to just throw shit against the wall with ESPN, and I'm just trying to shed some light as to how/why it could have happened. I haven't defended anything, just tried to explain how it could happen.

 

Give it up, please. If you can't write a headline in 40 characters, you don't belong on any copy desk anywhere. I wouldn't accept that excuse at a student newspaper. There's no confusion there.
I'll grant you we're making too big of a deal out of one headline. (ESPN writes a lot of bad headlines.) I only jumped in because your reason was ridiculous.
The bigger issue is ESPN's reluctance to jump in. But as I noted earlier, if you've been paying attention the past decade, it's not really much of a surprise. They have their thing. This ain't it.
They don't report. They put people in front of cameras to talk about it, spin it, argue it, etc.

 

They've had one that was worth morth more than a kettle of warm spit, and she was roundly ignored.