Orlando Sentinel/Dwight Howard Coverage

I am not sure if it is because of cutbacks or what, but The Orlando Sentinel is getting beat to death on the Dwight Howard story.

Over the last couple of days the Sentinel has been several hours behind national news outlets in reporting significant developments regarding Howard, who appears ready to leave the team for a bigger market. ESPN, TNT and ESPN the Magazine are all way out front.

As newspapers make cuts, they all talk about how they will refocus on local, local, local. But sometimes you can cut too much. For example, the absence of a national NBA beat can dry up sources and can lead to some of the gaps in coverage that we're seeing in Orlando.

And for the record, I am not an NBA writer for Orlando or anybody else -- just a fan of the Magic -- and I am noticing the Sentinel is coming in last on all the big stories.

 

Broussard owns the Howard coverage. He played in Howard's charity basketball game and has been to church services with him.

 

No surprise, really. The Orlando Sentinel has pretty much been dismantled.

 

The Sentinel does have a couple of solid NBA guys in Robbins and Schmitz. But if agents or team leaks decide who they're going to feed stories to, based on relationships or what serves their purposes best, it's hard for good journalists to overcome that. The lockout stuff -- riddled by bad info put out by one side other, BTW -- was like that, and free agency and trade deadline coverage always is like that.

 

It's not all that clear to me it would be a good strategy to invest dwindling resources into chasing commodifiable, quickly disappearing "scoops". In a world of instant retweets and aggregation, what value is there in being "first" for news that's going to come out no matter what--as Joe points out, much of it is spin anyway--aside from avoiding be attacked by fellow journalists on a message board?

 

As long as the fellow journalists go by a seemingly random string of consonants, I don't mind the attacks so much.

 

I see the problem more with ESPN than the Sentinel.

ESPN isn't about reporting the news, it's about making the news.

ESPN has a hard-on for the large markets and will continue to push for the top players to play in the biggest venues. They worked their asses off to get the Knicks into that catgory when LeBron was making his decision.

If Paul and Howard both end up on the Lakers, we can thank ESPN, not the Lakers.

 

Some have said that Twitter has made sports journalists more conscientious than ever about attributing the outlet that first "broke" the news, when writing follow-ups or analysis. Which is good, or so someone thinks.

But every time I read a line in a story that says, "ESPN (or Yahooo! or SI.com or whatever) first reported this," I think, "Who gives a rat's ass anymore?" If they did, it was minutes or an hour before. Not a "full news cycle," whatever that is anymore. And since so many of these operations now trade liberally in unsourced material, who really knows what's legit anyway? Also, I doubt the average reader is going to make a "buy" decision based on these miniscule scoops.

And even if they did, the "buy" decision most often is to keep getting the info for free anyway.

All seems intramural now, whose-johnson-is-bigger stuff that doesn't do a thing to serve the stories or the readers. Sports journalists need to get over themselves and their almight outlets.

 

This would have never happened if Zach McCann was still around. [/crossthread]

But really, newspapers are beat constantly on all big stories by ESPN, Yahoo and others. Part of it is sourcing standards. Part of it is that the national reporters all have deep sources such as power agents and top GMs and league officials. Part of it is those reporters don't have to worry about the daily grind newspaper beat writers deal with. And part of it is that when a newspaper reporter starts breaking stories, they get scooped up.

 

How long has Robbins been on the beat?

 

You won't win every story when ESPN is frankly in the business of getting Dwight Howard moved to a bigger market. ESPN, again, has a real financial stake in the news it's reporting.