I haven’t had time to follow the NFL Draft at all, so when I saw this post on AOL, I decided to check it out.
Unfortunately, it left me scratching my head once again about how awful today’s journalism is.
Sports Illustrated’s Tony Pauline reported three weeks ago that B.J. Raji, a former Boston College defensive lineman, failed a drug test at the NFL Combine in February. The only problem was, the report was immediately disputed by Raji and his agent, as well as many other news outlets.
(J-school 101 lesson: Get that juicy story, then confirm it with several other sources. Especially when you’re dealing with sources who refuse to be named; they’re suspicious characters. Or when you’re writing something that may well ruin a kid’s career before it starts.)
Just in time to toss some fuel on the already-blazing bonfire of shadiness, SI decided to simply pull the story from its website, offering only a cursory “we’re taking it down while we investigate further” PR non-explanation.
The damage had been done, however. When you report something like that about an amateur athlete who’s looking at a multimillion dollar contract as a first round draft pick, you’re going to cost him some major dough. The difference between a top-10 pick and a second-day gamble may simply be a small question mark. And a positive drug test is a King Kong-sized question mark looming over any team thinking about paying him first round money.
Now SI finally decided to run a 40-word correction, three weeks after posting the original report, saying they “regret the error.”
Really? You regret nearly costing big dude a fat paycheck, just because you thought getting the story first would get you one? Sounds like you got your hand caught in the cookie jar, and now after running out of siblings (and pets… and mailmen) to blame, you’re finally admitting you might have eaten just one.
Bush league, SI.
Mercifully, the story isn’t over for Raji. The correction came with a few days left until the draft, so teams will have a chance to give him a second look as the top-10 pick he should be.
But the question remains: Where is Pauline in all this? Did he decide to take a vacation, having broken this major story? Did SI tell him to clam up, lest the magazine look worse for not making sure he checked his sources?
Publications get things wrong all the time, increasingly so as the drive to get the story online first deepens. But if it only takes a day or two to report a story that could cost a young man his career, why does it take three weeks to confirm that, yes, you blew it?
Further evidence that Sports Illustrated has lost any shred of journalistic integrity it once had. It only took one click (two, if you count annoyingly having to click to read page two of a story) to find other errors on SI.com. In Don Banks’ featured article on the front page, he misuses apostrophes twice in one paragraph, saying most glaringly “the Pacman Jones’ error,” where it should just be “the Pacman Jones error.” Call it a small mistake that most internet readers wouldn’t notice, but if you’re paid to write, shouldn’t you have at least a grasp of punctuation rules?
Man, if I needed yet another reason to be glad I’ve strayed from wanting to be a sportswriter, it’s this. I’m glad I escaped the draw to be part of a magazine with such a stellar record of journalism, which I see now is pretty much relegated to archival material.
I mean, the swimsuit issue is the only reason the magazine is still profitable, so I guess when you consider this money-grubbing, light-on-ethics business model it’s perhaps not as hard to see why SI would skimp on reporting ethics too.
Just another reason to continue ignoring Sports Illustrated.
Plus, NFL.com wipes the floor with SI’s multimedia content anyway, a thought I will return to in another post soon.
Corey @ HM Magazine 