When The Legend Becomes Fact, A Blog Prints The Fact

Glen Martin probably didn't show up to class on Wednesday night to bury my hopes and dreams of becoming a journalist, but he did bring a shovel, one of those hard hats with the flashlights, and the polite suggestion I start digging. He shot straight and dispensed over 20 years of wisdom about the business to our Mass Media Writing class, laying out his vision for future of journalism. Spoiler alert: not good. Craigslist killed newspaper funding when they lost classified advertising dollars to the infinite internet. So we’d all better start thinking of alternative ways to get paid to write other than interning for 10 years while angling for the non-existent cub reporter spot at our local disappearing fishwrap.

But something else happened a few hours before class, a moment of pure bliss for all who’ve dreamed that journalism does have a future on the internet. Deadspin, a sports blog that ESPN V.P. John Walsh recently said this about, broke wide-open one of the wildest stories in quite some time - the tale of the inspirational college football star Manti Te'o and his dead car accident/leukemia victim girlfriend - which turned out to be a complete hoax.

The delicious irony of a sports blog, one that up to this point was most famous for publishing a photo of legendary Green Bay quarterback Brett Favre’s penis, breaking a story of such magnitude was almost too much for me to take. Sports Illustrated, ESPN, and CNN all wrote massive profiles of Te’o that lavished praise of his poise in such a troubling situation, playing football with unspeakable sadness fraying his soul.  Yet in all their researching and fact-checking this made-for-tv story, not once did any of them smell something rotten and let those journalistic instincts kick in. It took Deadspin five days to research the story and prove it was bunk. I guess the big-time journalist couldn’t resist the old adage: “When the legend becomes fact - print the legend.

Let me be honest here, I’m not calling out Martin and lumping him in with the poor job these big industry types pulled. His talk was informative and passionate, and he gave a lot of great advice for us prospective scribes.“Be the antimatter version of the prima donna,” was a favorite. But he definitely had a deflated viewpoint of the business, and in particular what will happen as more and more of the “papers of record” disappear and blogging becomes the dominate (if it isn’t already) news source.

Martin said “blogging isn’t reporting,” and that statement is technically true. I’m not reporting with this post, I’m just linking to interesting stuff and trying to make a point by pulling together a few different ideas floating around the ether. Blogging isn't reporting, but a blog can report. Deadspin proved just that. Time to put that shovel down for a bit longer, forget about digging, and get busy writing.