Who's cheating?

This from Buster Olney's blog this morning, saying that a competing Web site is back-dating stories to make it appear like it's breaking news.

The competition is part of what makes this fun, but this year, there have been times when a particular Web site will backdate its time stamp on the story to make it appear as if that site broke the news first. Happened again on Tuesday, in the aftermath of the Teixeira trade. Something to watch for.

Tacky, if true.

 

No more tacky then when ESPN.com gets beat on a story, has one of its guys play catch-up and write "ESPN.com's Joe Blow has confirmed ..."

And readers do not give a shit either way.

 

Sure it does, don't the readers obsess over who got the first time stamp?

I would say this exceeds tacky. If Onley is correct, seems the better description would be LYING.

 

Or when ESPN's "sources close to the (enter team here)" turn out to be wrong.

 

I agree there. But I think the note was meant to be picked up by the industry. Sort of an anonymous outing. Buster should have just named names if he's going to the trouble of posting about it.

 

I like Olney a lot . . . so no offense meant to him when I note that I wish that someone other than an employee of the world's pacesetting sports-reporting self-aggrandizers had come up with this little item.

 

Agreed, Ben...the ultimate pot/kettle scenario

 

My wife bought Buster's book last week in a binge at B&N, says: "Ever hear of this guy? It looks like he can write." Yup, he's very good, I say. There's a huge world of people who don't watch much ESPN. Even funnier, she probably read his stuff a thousand times in the NYT and couldn't recall the name. All this "we-have-learned" proclamations and being first by five minutes mean nothing to readers who have a life.

 

All of these five-minute "scoops" seem like an anachronism on the Web, a measurement carried forward from the days when a scoop meant beating the competition by a day in a newspaper or an evening news broadcast.

 

Anybody want to take a crack at which competing site is the one changing its time stamps?