How Sports Illustrated Nailed A-Rod, and Why It May Not Happen Again
by Peter Kafka
Posted on February 11, 2009 at 12:23 PM PT
Time Inc. boss Ann Moore made her case for the survival of magazines, and in a broader sense, traditional media: If they don’t make it, who’s going to do the work to get hard-to-find information?
If she’d just waited a few weeks, she could have saved herself some trouble and simply handed everyone she met a copy of today’s New York Observer, which has a great story about the story behind the Alex Rodriguez/steroids story that her own Sports Illustrated broke on Saturday.
Per the Observer’s John Koblin, here’s some of what SI reporter Selena Roberts (pictured above) went through to get the story:
- Roberts started on the story at least four months ago, when she was assigned a general profile of the Yankees superstar.
- By January, Roberts and colleague David Epstein were confirming rumors that Rodriguez’s name had surfaced in a 2003 drug test. They eventually cobbled together four different sources to confirm their story.
- Last week, Roberts flew from New York to Miami to confront Rodriguez directly. After an encounter with a security guard and the Miami police, she drove by his house, then tracked him down at a local gym.
- After getting a “no comment” from the player, she conferred with her editors, and the SI team then spent another 48 hours dotting i’s and crossing t’s before publishing.
It’s a neat tale, and one the folks at Time Warner (TWX) should be proud of. And it’s a good counterpoint to pundits who assure us that one day soon in the brave new world, old media gatekeepers like SI will be replaced by the collective wisdom of the Web. Because the last time I checked, crowd-sourcing didn’t pay for months of reporting, flights to Miami, a team of lawyers, etc.
Could a dogged individual, working without a net, have gotten this story? Theoretically. And some bloggers working primarily with crowd-sourced tips have done some great work, too–see the great work that Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo did on the Justice Department/Attorney General scandal last year. And, just to knock down that straw man–big media, armed with all sorts of resources, does get all sorts of stuff wrong, as the New York Times has admitted on a couple of occasions now.
But look at how much work Roberts and SI had to invest in tracking down what in the end isn’t a story that’s truly important, in a State-of-the-Union sense of the word. Now think about how much work it takes to suss out answers to much less sexy but more crucial questions, about, say, the way our government works.
I still don’t think that Moore’s argument–that these publications will survive because we need them to–will pan out. And I worry that only a small slice of us will get good info about important stuff. But when that day comes, I hope someone will have created a free Web archive of reporting like Roberts’s story, so that the rest of us can get a sense of what we’re missing.
Comments
While we are all praising Selena Roberts for her journalistic skills we should also remember her 2nd grade reporting on the Duke Lacrosse team. She completely convicted the players the coaches and the school – did she ever apologize, print any sort of article about the true facts – absolutely not. She is Dave Kingman – sure she hit a grand slam this time – but most of the time – she strikes out as an average journalist.
Posted by mike jay at February 11th, 2009 at 2:57 pmCitizen journalist mike jay has quite a counterpoint there.
And yet the original point stands. I once helped take on the FDIC when, during the farm crisis of the 90s, they were forcing farms into bankruptcy. They rejected alternative financing from the farmers who owned the properties with an end result of the FDIC foreclosing on those family farms.
Then those FDIC officials who forced the farms into foreclosure turned around and sold those properties for pennies on the dollar to a corporation called Redwood (as best I recall). Redwood then resold those farms for massive markups.
Guess who ran Redwood?
Yep, former FDIC officials.
I only played a minor roll in uncovering that scandal. It took a lot of groundwork by the reporters and support from the editorial staff and owners of the newspaper to get the job done.
We could only do it because we were part “big media” that had the resources to dedicate to the pursuit of a very important, if less than sexy, story.
Posted by Eric Welch at February 12th, 2009 at 10:31 amWait, what? At what point has *anyone* suggested that there won’t be any paid journalists out there?
You seem to have set up a nice strawman here.
Posted by Michael Masnick at February 12th, 2009 at 11:37 amOf course there will be paid journalists. But ask anyone who’s currently in that field: The number of us who are going to get the resources to do the work that Roberts and co. did for this story is a small group that’s going to get smaller. Some people are fine with that — if the market wanted in-depth investigations (or whatever energy-intensive work that doesn’t reliably produce a high ROI), it would let us know, etc. Other folks, like myself, will be sad to see them dwindle away.
Posted by Peter Kafka at February 12th, 2009 at 2:40 pmNo offense, but many of those “currently in the field” seem to be a bit clueless about basic economics concerning the production of what they do.
While newspapers are struggling right now, there are alternative business models that can and will support investigative reporting.
Also, it’s worth noting that “investigative reporting” is a modern phenomenon. It really only came about in its current form in the 70s. So it’s not exactly part of the “grand tradition” of journalism.
Posted by Michael Masnick at February 12th, 2009 at 6:42 pm1) Newspapers used to be fantastically profitable operations due to their monopoly control of local advertising markets. Now that this has disappeared, and that the papers owners are drowning in debt, papers can’t support the large payrolls they once did. What else do us dummies need to know?
Posted by Peter Kafka at February 12th, 2009 at 7:30 pm2) Great to hear. Lay them out, please.
3) I can think of a lot of things that were developed since, say, 1972. It’d be a shame if we have to go without them.