The "crawl" stands alone

One dubious journalistic tradition used to be, when a media outlet puffed up to claim credit for a scoop, it folded the boast into some other sentence of the story that was there on merit. Especially when we're talking about a sheer timing situation, such as learning about a player's suspension or a coach's termination hours or maybe minutes before it is in the public domain (as opposed to, say, Clemens' country-music dalliance courtesy of NYDN).

Now we get the print version of the notorious, "ESPN.com's Joe Blow is reporting..." as a stand-alone, one-sentence paragraph in the body of the story.

As in:

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/news/story?id=3375306

... where everybody's got to move on."

ESPN.com's Marc Stein first reported the news of Johnson's ouster.

NBA front-office sources told ESPN.com that both the Mavs and Johnson ...

This is on a page that was updated at 1:08 AM ET. The firing already had been out there for hours and these guys are still hanging onto credit like a pit bull clamped on your daughter's cheek. Me, me, me, me. I reported this first. Yeah, me!

Don't they know they already have won? That whole damn network is your brother-in-law wearing gold chains and pinky rings, reminding you of what a killing he made last year selling Amway stuff.

 

That is nowhere near as blatant as this from the NYDN:

Thursday, May 1st 2008, 8:12 AM



Rangers tough guy Sean Avery's tumultuous season is over, ended by a lacerated spleen in a devastating playoff loss.

Avery was recovering in St. Vincent's Hospital Manhattan after the injury - first reported Wednesday on the Daily News Web site, nydailynews.com - in a collision in Tuesday night's loss to Pittsburgh.


Actually, what the News reported was that he was rushed to the hospital at 3 a.m. in cardiac arrest. So, they got it first that he was hospitalized but were 100% wrong on every other detail....so let's make sure we tell everybody we had it first, who cares if we were wrong.

 

With all the websites/blogs in existence, somebody needs to start a SuperScooperSite that keeps a running scoreboard on who's first with all the breaking news. (Blue font considered before posting.)

 

They could have a secondary site tracking the accuracy of prediction columns and maybe a tote board comparing different writers' mock drafts, after the fact.

Of course, ESPN.com's Heywood Jablowme had these ideas first.