Lloyd Carr announced his retirement today during a 10am Press Conference during which he was expected to.
As passed along here last Monday, the first reports of this impending announcement came not from a Detroit, Ann-Arbor, or University of Michigan newspaper or television station but from a Michigan fan blog called MGoBlog.com.
How this report was treated is an interesting study in journalism in 2007 and beyond.
The New York Times and close friend of mine Pete Thamel credited MGoBlog but not without taking a pot shot at the blogs other more fan-oriented content.
ESPN treated the report as a rumor and never mentioned MGoBlog in any of the speculative stories it ran last week, that I had read at least and on Saturday when it became more apparent that Monday was going to be the announcement that Carr was retiring ran the following sentence on its ticker "Lloyd Carr expected to announce retirement Monday, ESPN.com has learned".
My question is since MGoBlog's information turned out to be dead on, shouldn't it have been credited as the source of these reports? Or does news have to come from Institutionalized (what is "Mainstream" nowadays?) Media in order to be credited?
I have a feeling in journalism schools all over the country, students are being told that blogs are a fad and will be obsolete in three years and that the access they are paying $100,000 and taking classes for four years for will be theirs and theirs alone once they graduate, but in today's media climate, is that necessarily the truth? Or is the truth that news told from outside Institutionalized Media will be treated as conjecture until someone inside Institutionalized Media reports it as fact?
I have no doubt Lloyd Carr's retirement will not be the last major sports story to be broken by someone in the "blogosphere", I do wonder when that person will first get credit.
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The problem with blogs is, no one knows which ones are credible. Remember the Giselle Bundchen pregnancy rumors? Completely fabricated. But a lot of blogs do have good, accurate, fast information. Newspapers are already obsolete, sportswriters will be soon too, so the only way they can survive is to adapt, but the only way they think they can survive is by trying to convince people that blogs stink. Sort of like the music industry suing Napster to death. Music downloading was just a fad right?
Also, didn't every major newspaper say there was no way A-Rod was coming back to the Yankees, and the New York papers said the Mets had locked up Yorvit.
The lesson, blogs are great, but you have to be careful which ones you believe.
And ignore cranky sportswriters, everyone else does.
Sure, Paul, but the same can be said for the MSM. The Birmingham News broke the story that Rich Rodriguez would be Alabama's coach last year, but that was proven to be a baseless rumor. Jayson Blair, formerly of the NYT, well, you know.
You raise the point that not all blogs are reliable in their information (same for the MSM) and that it is sometimes difficult to separate fact from fiction, but then is it appropriate for the MSM to paint all bloggers with such a broad brush, and isn't their business anyway to separate said fact from said fiction? Pete Thamel copped out in his criticism of MGoBlog, as have others before him.
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