National Sports Journalism Center

Where's the Line? from IU Journalism on Vimeo.

Note: The following is a partial transcript of a panel discussion held at IUPUI on Nov. 2, 2010 titled “Where’s the line? Sports Media in the Digital Age.’ The panel was moderated by Tim Franklin, director of the IU National Sports Journalism Center, and panelists included ESPN Vice President and Editor-in-Chief of ESPN.com Rob King, Washington Post columnist Mike Wise, Deadspin.com Editor-in-Chief A.J. Daulerio, and WISH-TV reporter Ashley Adamson.
 
Tim Franklin (Opening comments): There’s a new paradigm in the sports industry, and indeed in the entire media business. The Internet and the new technologies that they’ve spawned are allowing sports news consumers access to information 24-7. Computers, iPads, smart phones and other devices. There’s never been easier or more convenient access to news and information as there is now.
 
At the same time, there have never been more sources providing that information. Of course, there are journalists from traditional newspapers, websites and television analysts that are writers for the sports teams, the leagues and the conferences themselves, and increasingly fan sites, independent bloggers and the athletes themselves are providing information on websites and mobile devices and through social networks like Twitter and Facebook. With this explosion of information, however, come profound questions for the sports media industry and those who rely on it for news and entertainment. What information can you trust? Do you even need brand-name news outlets providing reported and edited information anymore? Is information being injected into the media bloodstream before it’s ready or been verified? Are legacy news organizations like ESPN, the Washington Post, WISH-TV, and others changing their standards in order to compete against these new upstart sources of news and information who are now capturing readers and advertisers at a rapid pace? And who holds independent bloggers accountable when they get it wrong?
 
This new paradigm is also creating havoc for the public relations directors at professional and collegiate sports teams. Should they give credentials and complete access to independent bloggers just as they do traditional news organizations? Some sports teams, like the Los Angeles Dodgers, have. Others have posed restrictions on bloggers or don’t credential them at all. The director of media relations for the Indiana Pacers, a former newspaper sports journalist himself, recently called sports journalism in the digital age “the wild west.” Was that wild west metaphor evident in the recent coverage of sex scandals involving Tiger Woods and Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre?
 
Well, tonight we’re going to explore answers to all those questions, and given our panelist here this evening and the controversial nature of the topic, it’s entirely possible this session could look like the Wild West by the time we’re done with it.
 
So let’s plunge right away into the questions, and I don’t want to bury the lead, so we’re going to start with the most topical right away. So A.J. I want to start with you if that’s OK. You’ve been at the center of this whole national firestorm lately over Brett Favre. Can you walk us through the process of how you were tipped off on the Brett Favre situation with New York Jets game day host Jenn Sterger? Can you talk about what discussions did you have regarding whether or not to pay a source for information on Brett Favre’s voicemails and the photos of Favre himself?
 
A.J. Daulerio: That’s probably a lot longer story than, I mean, the whole entire process took about six months from the first time I had conversation with Jenn Sterger to our initial story in August. There was a lot of back-and-forth between myself and Jenn and my boss Nick Denton at the time as to whether or not we could go with the story just with all the evidence that she had — i.e. the penis photos, the voicemails, etc. — without her name attached to it because that’s initially what she’d requested because at the time she had just got the job at The Daily Line and was looking to become more mainstream and didn’t want to end up like a Rachel Uchitel in the media.
 
The problem with that situation was that Jenn had not just told me this, but she had told lots of other people the same story. And I had had a conversation with her to the affect of, ‘Well, OK, I’m not going to run with this now. I’d really like to meet with you, but I’m not going to sit on this forever as well. And that was pretty well established form the get go. And from there we just made phone calls for lots of months, talking to as many people as possible that heard the story, and around August, once Brett Favre was going to do his whole, ‘Will he retire?’ ‘Won’t he retire?’ I had that bookmarked in my mind, basically, as, ‘OK, that’s a good time to put this out there if we have enough to go with it.’ And I know there are other people who have the information out there.
 
So that initial story was basically meant to put up a bat signal for whoever else had this information to kind of step forward and talk to us, and we’ll go from there. That happens, obviously, and we had had the discussions about whether or not to pay for this, and it just didn’t clear up, there’s not, like, a pile of money sitting at Gawker Media where you can just go grab from it and buy anything you want to. These are kind of decisions you have to make against your own site. You’re basically taking out a loan and saying things, that, yes, we’ll probably yield this much traffic and visibility, and is it going to be worth it? So my job is to decide whether or not it’s worth it. And in this case I chose right.
 
Tim Franklin: So you paid a source for the voice mails and the photos of Favre …
 
A.J. Daulerio: Yes I did.
 
Tim Franklin: … and can you say tonight whom you paid and how much?
 
A.J. Daulerio: Uh, no I won’t say who or how much just because that was part of the deal I made with that person. I can say it was probably the shadiest situation I’ve ever been in my life.
 
Tim Franklin: In what regard?
 
A.J. Daulerio: I’m kind of walking around New York with an envelope full of cash, more than I’d ever seen, meeting mysterious X-person in a hotel to go see a picture of Brett Favre’s penis (crowd laughs).
 
Tim Franklin: And give us some more detail. How was it? What type of day?
 
A.J. Daulerio: This was about two weeks, I guess a week before we were going to publish it. We had to coordinate travel for this person. We had to have all these things fall in place. We had to kind of pay in cash. I had to sign this waiver at work basically saying that I’m the only person who knows who this guy is in case there is any kind of legal ramifications that may come up and I’m willing to go to jail to keep my sources kind of basically from not going to jail. And it was kind of intense, I’m not going to lie. But so far so good. Who knows what’s going to happen in the next week. We’re mercifully coming to the tail end of this story, which I’m sure Rob’s (King) happy about at this point.
 
But was it an exhilarating experience? I think just from a journalist’s perspective, if I can use that right now, just to see how all that other stuff worked on the other side, stuff that you’ve read about but never actually seen or expected been a part of.
 
Tim Franklin: How often does Deadspin pay sources for information?
 
A.J. Daulerio: This is the third time we’ve paid for information.
 
Tim Franklin: And did you have any ethical qualms about doing that?
 
A.J. Daulerio: Not one bit.
 
Tim Franklin: Why not?
 
A.J. Daulerio: That’s just not how I operate.
 
Tim Franklin: Alright, the story’s big enough and you felt if the information was legitimate you didn’t have any qualms about paying for it.
 
A.J. Daulerio: Yes.
 
Tim Franklin: Alright. Now, according to news reports Favre has confirmed that he left the voice mails for Jenn Sterger that you published on Deadspin. But he denies sending the explicit photos of himself.
 
A.J. Daulerio: Did not admit, not denied.
 
Tim Franklin: What’s that?
 
A.J. Daulerio: He did not admit, but he did not deny.
 
Tim Franklin: Alright, so how did you, without giving us too many details, how did you know it was Favre in the pictures, and how do you justify publishing them if you’re not sure?
 
A.J. Daulerio: Well, OK, well I’m glad we had this conversation over dinner first (laughter). Like I said, we talked to lots of people who knew Brett Favre better than you or I do, and there were a lot of people who played with Favre in Green Bay for a long period of time, who knew who Brett Favre was from those photos.
 
Tim Franklin: OK, I’m not sure I want to pursue that too much further. Alright, Rob, let me ask you. So imagine that you’re presented with the same set of facts that A.J. was presented with, and you have texts, or you have voice mails, you have sexting from the quarterback to Jenn Sterger. Would you have pursued this story further? And how might you have handled it differently than A.J.?
 
Rob King: Well, I think it’s safe to say we probably would not have paid money, so that’s different.
 
Tim Franklin: Why not?
 
Rob King: Because we don’t do that.
 
Tim Franklin: Ever?
 
Rob King: Never to my knowledge. We, and I should be careful. One thing I should say is in the world of magazine publishing, sometimes you pay somebody to be on the cover of the magazine. That’s not paying for information, that’s paying for access. There’s certainly creative deals you can do around getting access to an athlete, like a time buy on television and talk about a decision about where you’re going to be playing next year. But we’ve never walked around with a bag full of cash. So that’s one difference.
 
The other thing is, it would’ve taken some extraordinary circumstances for us to do anything without the cooperation of Jenn Sterger. I think that that probably would’ve halted us if we didn’t have statements that we could make or if we couldn’t present her point of view. If we didn’t have – certainly I think A.J. has spent a lot of time trying to get to Brett through Bus Cook, and we would’ve worked all those angles pretty aggressively. But I think the absence of Jenn would’ve surely changed our pace.
 
You know, and look, don’t mess around with this: They’re just in a different business, with a different mission serving an audience a different way. Now, we like to play the ‘what if?’ game. You sit around and say, ‘Alright, uh, who’s going to tip the scale? If it’s Derek Jeter, do we go? A year ago we’d say, ‘If it’s Tiger, do we go?’ We know what that looked like. We certainly think about this, and we certainly ask ourselves questions about what the tipping point might be. But, specifically these incidents, that’s where the differences lie.
 
Tim Franklin: Mike, what do you think of Deadspin’s handling of the Favre story, and would the Washington Post pay for a story. And would you go through a more rigorous confirmation process before publishing? And how do you and the post compete against websites like Deadspin that may have different standards?
 
Mike Wise: That’s a lot of questions, Tim.
 
Tim Franklin: Should I speak more slowly.
 
Mike Wise: I’ve just got to think one-by-one. The, I guess, easiest way to say it, we wouldn’t pay for a source. We wouldn’t, it’s just not what we do. It’s checkbook journalism and, with all due respect to ESPN and Rob, because they do, I think everybody walks fine lines, but we’ve all sort of looked for that name, that get to vault us in the ratings. And in ESPN’s case recently, and I don’t know if I can say, Rob, that the network actually paid for LeBron’s access, but there was a business arrangement that went outside of editorial, and you said yourself, ‘Hold on a minute.’ And the only thing I had a problem with was, how does Jim Gray get, someone has to know how Jim Gray got paid. When you find out later that he got paid through the University of Phoenix and the sponsors he lined up, he’s essentially Don King putting this site together, it kind of made you think, like one guy said, the Enabling Sports Personalities Network. I think that’s a little rash, but, so I think we’re all, any chance …
 
Rob King: In my house it’s Every Spouse’s Perfect Nightmare (laughter).
 
Mike Wise: A.J. is allowed, because of Deadspin, to obliterate that line, and you can go past it, and so to judge him and his website’s ethics on the same level as us is really apples and oranges in a lot of ways. I don’t want to let him off the hook because there’s a lot of things that went down with that. But let’s say toward that, I think there was a legitimate news story there, don’t let anybody fool you about that. Forget about Brett Favre texting his penis to somebody, or allegedly texting his penis to somebody, this is a guy that possibly sexually harassed an employee he worked with. Anybody in America would want that story. The Washington Post, Deadspin, everybody would want that story.
 
But I think in the same thing, I have a problem with the whole idea, you know, outing the source and using Jenn’s e-mails that were obviously personal e-mails and not getting a full OK from her because, and I’m sure A.J.’s got stories and Rob and Ashley have got stories that have never been told because someone wouldn’t go on record with you. Well, we all do. But at some point, wherever I went to school, wherever it was the journalism professor that planted it in my brain, you don’t screw over a source. You just don’t. Especially with something of that personal nature.”
 
Tim Franklin: OK, I want to come back to that point. Ashley, I want to get your take. If Brett Favre had been a member of the Indianapolis Colts when the story broke, would you have gone on the air with Deadspin’s information? Would you have waited for the NFL’s investigation? I mean, the story was all over the Internet by that point. What would you have done in that situation?
 
Ashley Adamson: Let’s say that Brett Favre is Peyton Manning in that situation. That would be apples to apples. I can say almost for 100 percent certainty that we would not have …
 
Tim Franklin: Really? Why?
 
Ashley Adamson: Yeah, I, number one, I should point out that it wouldn’t have been my call one way or another. I think, and Rob mentioned  it, everybody kind of has, we all serve different purposes. People go to different sources for different types of information. WISH-TV and local sportscasts to see Peyton Manning give his everyday sound byte on Wednesday in the locker room, and to see Pierre Garcon smiling and talking about his one-handed catch from the week before. They want to see, people want to see their team shed in a good light. And I think a lot of times, I think the Indianapolis media in general, takes a hit for some of the ways that I think we do cover for the Colts a little bit. I haven’t been here long enough to speak too personally for that …
 
Tim Franklin: You’ve been here since February, right?
 
Ashley Adamson: … and I know people in the national media take shots at the Indianapolis media by saying that we let the Colts get away with murder, and don’t really push them and Bill Polian runs the show and that we kind of step back and let them do their thing, and if they were in any other market in the world, New York or something like that, they wouldn’t get away with it. So like I said, it wouldn’t have been a choice for me to have made, but if it had just been that it came out on Deadspin that Peyton had done this, I’m almost certain that just off that there is no way we would’ve reported it.
 
Tim Franklin: OK. And A.J., is there anything coming on Peyton on Deadspin that we should be aware of? (laughter) I’m kidding. Actually, maybe I’m not kidding (laughter). OK, A.J., let’s circle back to you. You did an interview with Poynter Institute columnist Bill Krueger back in August …
 
A.J. Daulerio: Nice man.
 
Tim Franklin: Yeah, he is, I’ve talked to him myself. And right after breaking the first phase of this story, I think is when you did this interview with him. And in a response to a question about your decision to run the story and identify Sterger, you responded, ‘Our rules are a little bit different. My rules are a little bit different.’ Could you explain your rules, or philosophies, on protecting anonymous sources?
 
A.J. Daulerio: Well, that’s the one thing. Let’s just make this perfectly clear that Jenn Sterger is not Mark Feldt here in the situation. It’s not like …
 
Tim Franklin: Mark Feldt was Deep Throat for those of you young enough to not know.
 
A.J. Daulerio: Yeah, it’s not like we had a bar conversation one-on-one where we’re buddies and she’s says, ‘Shh, don’t tell anybody.’ Jenn Sterger’s trying to negotiate a deal from the get-go just basically trying to save her career, but also just to kind of out Brett Favre as, in her words, ‘The creepy douche that he is,” which is a story that she had told many, many people a number of times. But what was most interesting for me outside of just an athlete stepping away from his marriage, was the fact that there was somebody in the Jets organization that was possibly facilitating this whole entire thing. She was on the record with that as far as I’m concerned.
 
And there were many, many conversations where Jenn and I had where I basically said to her, ‘Look, I’m going to go with this in some way, shape or form.’ And when we finally came to the final flare that I shot up before I was going to go with this, she said, in my mind, she agreed. But I also know she works for Comcast and The Daily Line. And I’m thinking, ‘Well, this is probably going to be a very, very big story. Why wouldn’t she go to them first?’ So at that point I’m making like a last-minute decision to go with her, make myself look like the idiot and just her the shrinking violet in this whole entire situation. But my angle really wasn’t about Jenn Sterger. It was about getting that evidence and looking into the deeper story that was there, which, as we all know, is there.
 
Tim Franklin: So, just to be clear, you had promised Sterger anonymity, correct?
 
A.J. Daulerio: No, only if she came forward with all the evidence. And then, it was like, I said I was never going to sit on this story forever, and I am not going to walk away from this story. And I had told her, ‘I am going with this story, and our story, our conversation, she in my mind said, ‘OK, hold on, let me get back to you.’ Twelve hours later it didn’t happen, I made the call. It’s not going to happen every time, but I mean, just based on this story alone, that’s the decision I made.
 
Tim Franklin: Did you feel like you had the go ahead from her?
 
A.J. Daulerio: Not really. I mean, I can sit here and justify it almost all the time, but I mean, no. But I also knew that any potential backlash that I was going to get from making that decision, the payoff was a lot larger. And it was the right decision at the time to make.
 
Tim Franklin: So you were concerned that a number of web outlets or news organizations were going to get this story and she’d been talking to other people about it.
 
A.J. Daulerio: Plenty of people knew about this.
 
Tim Franklin: So, I mean, it is common journalistic practice to talk to someone off the record and try to get it confirmed through other sources. So is that definitely what happened in this case?
 
A.J. Daulerio: Right. That happened.
 
Tim Franklin: OK, I just wanted to be clear about that. Because I know you’ve been beat up quite a bit on that topic.
 
A.J. Daulerio: Not at all.
 
Tim Franklin: OK, so when the NFL Security Division contacted you pretty recently, right? In the last few days. You wrote on your site, “I told him I'd be willing to speak with them but would not give up the source of the material or any other information that would possibly jeopardize the source's anonymity.” Is that correct?
 
A.J. Daulerio: Yes.
 
Tim Franklin: And we’re talking about the third party who you paid for the …
 
A.J. Daulerio: Mr. X.
 
Tim Franklin: Yes. So, is this stance inconsistent at all when you already have sort of violated the confidentiality agreement with a source yourself?
 
A.J. Daulerio: Yes, 100 percent.
 
Tim Franklin: It is inconsistent.
 
A.J. Daulerio: Yeah.
 
Tim Franklin: So how do you … ?
 
A.J. Daulerio: It’s a judgment call. I mean, that’s what I had to do at the time. There were forms signed and everything like that in terms of Mr. X and what not. With Jenn Sterger there was nothing ever on paper that basically said, ‘This is completely anonymous.’ And there’s a lot of back story on this I’m not going to disclose. But I mean, look, I presented it one way, I fell on my sword basically for Jenn Sterger. But we’re going to see in the next couple weeks exactly what the main story is there.
 
Tim Franklin: And what do you think that’s going to be?
 
A.J. Daulerio: I think she had all this stuff on her computer for a while for a reason. So this was going to come out in whatever way is going to benefit her career.
 
Tim Franklin: OK. And do you expect there will be litigation, between Jenn Sterger and the Jets and Brett Favre?
 
A.J. Daulerio: Yes, I’m expecting her to sue the Jets, yeah.
 
Tim Franklin: And have you been contacted by the NFL about, will they follow up with you? Or do you think your conversations with the NFL are … ?
 
A.J. Daulerio: I think they’re pretty much done. But I’d be more than happy to help, whatever that may be.
 
Tim Franklin: Except giving them the source, right?
 
A.J. Daulerio: Yeah, of course. It’s so unethical. (laughter)
 
Tim Franklin: Well, we talked just a little bit earlier this evening, but how would you characterize Deadspin? Is Deadspin the National Enquirer online? Is it TMZ.com online? What is it?
 
A.J. Daulerio: Well, I said during dinner tonight, that comparison pops up anytime we have a story of this magnitude that pops up into the mainstream. I guess that’s fair in one way, but I also know we’re not chasing people around airports and stuff like that and getting pictures and stuff. I mean, there is a depth to some of our stories — not all of them — but there is a conscious decision on my part to live in both worlds a little bit, where we can do something that’s serious and palatable for mainstream people and people who don’t want to read about penis stuff and all that kind of stuff, but I do think we have to kind of be a tabloid under the umbrella of Gawker Media. We’re automatically kind of put there anyway. And I enjoy that stuff.
 
Some of that stuff is just fun to read. More often than not, a lot of this stuff is just kind of harmless. But the main thrust of the site, and I’m still a little, I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen post-Brett Favre to Deadspin because I have to see how this all plays out and how it all settles down. But I can tell you that it’s not going to be more Brett Favre-like stories. If they fall into our lap, which a lot of these things do, we investigate them as best as we possibly can, and then make the decision whether to move on them or not. But it’s not like every day where we’re like, ‘Oh, who’s cheating on who’s wife?’ da da da, so like, you know, trying to out people or things like that. We’re just looking for good stories that are entertaining to people, to basically, like me, my editor, and then that’s where it begins and ends.
 
Tim Franklin: Did you have any pangs about publishing the explicit photos?
 
A.J. Daulerio: No, we’ve done that several times already.
 
Tim Franklin: You have? How many times?
 
A.J. Daulerio: I believe we’ve had four male penises on the site at this point.
 
Tim Franklin: OK, and can you talk about your traffic, to Deadspin’s traffic since the Favre story?
 
A.J. Daulerio: Yeah, yeah, it’s quadrupled. It’s been pretty significant. But that is this month. Next month it will tail off and we’ll see how many people are left. Maybe something big will happen in the next month or two that will be bigger than Brett Favre. Who knows?
 
Tim Franklin: It sounds like you’re teasing us on a story you’ve got.
 
A.J. Daulerio: Not at all.
 
Tim Franklin: One final question on this and then we’ll move on to another topic: I saw you on CNN, you’ve been on the Today Show …
 
A.J. Daulerio: Yeah, media superstar.
 
Tim Franklin: Yes you are in the last couple of weeks. And on CNN, on Reliable Sources, you were asked about when the history of the story is written, how will you be regarded. And you said something to the effect of, there may be two scumbags in this story, Brett Favre and yourself. Can you elaborate on that?
 
A.J. Daulerio: Well, at the end of the day I don’t’ think Jenn Sterger did anything wrong on either end of this. Whatever you think of her previous career, posing in Maxim or Playboy or whatever, I think she’s an opportunist. I think most of that is irrelevant to this story. I think most of the criticism that’s come from the story initially was about how we did it. And I think that’s perfectly valid. I’m comfortable playing that role because I know the truth is eventually going to come out 100 percent where everybody’s going to know that what we reported is right.
 
Tim Franklin: Alright, Rob, changing subjects, ESPN has drawn criticism for not being aggressive and reporting the Ben Roethlisburger civil lawsuit case as quickly as it should have. Some have even alleged that the network’s partnership with the NFL played a role in the slowness in getting to that story. Vince Doria, ESPN’s Senior VP for News — and also, in the interest of full disclosure, is on the advisory board for the sports center here — told Don Ohlmeyer, ESPN’s ombudsman, that the case wasn’t reported because it didn’t satisfy ESPN’s criteria: Criminal charges hadn’t been filed, there was no established pattern of behavior, the on-field impact could not be determined, and Roethlisburger had not spoken publicly yet. But ESPN reported about another civil case, one involving former NFL receiver Marvin Harrison for a shooting in Philadelphia in which criminal charges were not filed. So how do you differentiate between the two cases, and what do you think  about ESPN’s coverage of the Roethlisburger case?
 
Rob King: Uh, where do I start? Those are big questions. What you’re talking about right now is, first of all, that Roethlisburger story that you’re talking about is more than a year old, and as happens in the world of sports, a lot of other stories pop up as test cases that show our tolerance for new standards. The Marvin Harrison comparison is one that some folks have raised, but it’s all in the eye of the beholder. There are other folks who’ve raised the comparison of our coverage of Los Angeles Lakers guard Shannon Brown, who around the NBA Finals two years ago was facing charges of impropriety and there was intent to file a civil suit, and that never happened.
 
Go all the way back to the standard by which we did not immediately report Ben Roethlisburger a couple years ago, dating back to 1992 or 1993, ESPN established a policy about civil suits. Anyone can file a civil suit. It does not mean that there’s a result that comes out about it. We went aggressive about a case involving the New York Mets in ’92, we didn’t really like where we were on that, so as many times happens with polices, we created a policy that said civil suits are not the trigger. We need this to go further. And that stood for a pretty good stance for 10 years. And there are cases like the Michael Vick-Ron Mexico story that other places did report, and we did not report. There were allegations that Michael Vick had passed along a social disease and used an acronym, and there was a civil suit involved and we never reported that story. And that was back before dogs.
 
So the Roethlisburger case was one in which Vince, who was one of the architects of this policy, and others really felt as if they’d landed on something that people could understand, in pure and simple terms. As happens with virtually any set of guidelines, there are conversations around those guidelines. They don’t have anything to do with partnerships. As in the case of Shannon Brown, they’re an overreaction to the concern that we might be viewed as being complicit with the NBA’s desire to not have any unsavory stories around the NBA Finals. That’s why the Shannon Brown story was reported. And I’d also tell you that what’s happened over the last seven, eight years, is ESPN has been blessed with the arrival of a bunch of journalists of a lot of different backgrounds.
 
And one of the things that came up with Shannon Brown and Marvin Harrison and Ben Roethlisburger is you had African American guys, and you had a white guy. And as invariably happens, we have the ESPYs and somebody is, you know, Ben Roethlisburger is a hero at the ESPYs, whereas invariably happens, Ben Roethlisburger is in a Dick’s Sporting Goods ad. And he’s all over our air, and then this story comes forth and we’re slow to report it. And if Vince were here, he would tell you, you know, this case, we were made aware of this case like a year after the charges, the circumstances around the allegations bore further reporting. There were some arguments that were made that do not stand the test of time, like, ‘Oh, he has no record of this behavior.’ Well, we figured out down the line. And I’ll tell you about, and this is going to sound like company man stuff, but the great thing about being inside the walls of ESPN is that there are a ton of smart people with a ton of opinions.
 
And this was one that was a real test moment for us internally, because it wasn’t the first 24 hours, it was in the 48^th hour when his agent responded and there was clearly some momentum. The New York Times had reported. The AP had reported. And again, Vince would tell you that there were a number of us walking into his office saying, ‘Where are we? We need to go. We need to figure out what this story is.’ Now that is I think part and parcel to having a lot of different platforms to which we report news. I was telling this story at dinner, but, the Roethlisburger story was reported on ESPN.com. It was reported on his player card page, because the player cards are automated with content that comes in these wire streams and this AccuScore unique information feed actually was sending the Ben Roethlisburger charged with sexual assault story to his player card. So you couldn’t see it on the front of ESPN.com, but you could see it on his player card.
 
Mike Wise: That’s a heck of a trading card.
 
Rob King: Yeah, it’s not the best system. We were literally, in the first 60 hours, looking for that story and taking it down and then saying, look, this is beyond pale. I do think that when you are reporting big news from a mobile feed to a bottom alert that’s essentially a sentence to somebody doing an on-air read that’s essentially a paragraph, to writing the story on ESPN.com, which is a more full report. And when you’re reacting in real time, so you’ve got people who’ve got a limited amount of information but you’re on camera actually reacting to a headline with some news, sometimes you do need guidelines and tell people, ‘Wait a minute. Story’s got to get to here before we release the dogs.’ And in this case, I think we continue — and Don Ohlmeyer’s been talking to us — we continue to think about what our set of guidelines should look like. We’ve actually crafted a pretty thick book about ethical guidelines and standards, because it covers everything from discussions of the media to being involved with elections. It’s really important for us to figure out how to get this right, because we have reached the point where it doesn’t matter what the story is, ESPN becomes a part of it. Either we’re first with the story or we’re way too late with the story, or some blogger has written it and we’ve stumbled across it and publish it and then somebody says we stole it from that person. Or somebody says this on the radio at 9:15 and somebody says this on television at 10:15, and they don’t seem to match up so ESPN doesn’t know what it’s doing. It is, nobody should feel sorry for us, we’re not asking anybody to feel sorry for us. It is the reality of being as big and fast moving as we are.
 
Tim Franklin: OK. So, Mike, you were involved in a controversy a couple months ago when, as a hoax, you sent out a false tweet about the number of games, speaking of Roethlisburger, that Roethlisburger would be suspended. You have said that you were trying to make a point about ‘infotainment’ in news coverage. You told NPR in explaining your situation, ‘I dislike the idea of someone hiding behind the idea that ‘I don’t have classical journalism training, so my job is to put news out there irrespective of whether it’s wrong or not.' Why do you think that’s significant? Can’t the public discern for themselves the difference between credible and non-credible news sources? Or has the line been blurred so much they can’t tell. Where is the line, to borrow the phrase of this program tonight?
 
Mike Wise: Can we talk about Brett Favre again? (laughter) I think the lines have been blurred a little bit as newspapers try to find ways to compete with places like Gawker media and, frankly, make money off the Internet, which really has been the downfall of a lot of American newspapers, their inability to find revenue streams for what’s on the Web.
 
Yeah, there’s a lot of that blurred. And my concern is this. And, one, say, I had to do a four-hour radio show in D.C., which was the dumbest thing I ever took on in my life. So, all I do is spend time writing my column during the show. And so at any rate, it’s a great lesson in the dangers of multi-platforming. And so I’m sitting here at, whatever it was, 11 a.m., going, you know, ‘I don’t know if I have a segment the next hour.’ And I’m sitting here talking to my producer going, ‘You know, (Mike) Florio’s an idiot from profootball.com. I bet if I put one line up, he’ll gobble it up and make a homepage out of it.’ He’s the same idiot that said that Terry Bradshaw was dead, and later realized he wasn’t dead and had to retract that, and so, which isn’t the nicest thing to do. If I had to do it all over again I would’ve called Mike Florio and told him I was in jest. I told everybody on my radio show this. And at no point in my head, in my small brain that day, am I thinking a radio bit is going to turn into a national story that I’m going to get suspended a month for from The Post. What I forgot is my Twitter account actually identifies me as a Washington Post columnist, so a lot of people accused me of trading on the credibility of the Washington Post. No, I was just doing a stupid radio bit and had not thought to myself for one second that that would be contained. So at any rate, it comes out. I really did try to tweet that I was joking within five minutes, but 40 minutes had gone by on the radio show and I looked at it and it said ‘Twitter over capacity,’ and it never went out. So now I’m screwed. And so, then I tried to go with it and say I heard it from a casino employee. So it was a bad, there was 10 ways in which I could have proved that people will write anything nowadays. That was not the best way to do it. But anyway, a lot of news organizations, some respected, picked up on it and went crazy with it.
 
Tim Franklin: Like which ones?
 
Mike Wise: I believe the Miami Herald, the Baltimore Sun, the Pro Football Talk. And it was a good lesson, a really good lesson. I’m not, nothing is contained in these chambers we live in. Once you’re out there in Twitter land, in radio land, in print, you’re everywhere. So hence, I bore the repercussions of it. I do have a problem with, to this day, a world in which we’re more worried about being first than we’re worried about being right. I think that that’s a damn shame that we’ve gotten to this point in the business that we’re so scared that we’re going to get beat that you need to put out something that you might not know is true because someone else might beat you to it.
 
Tim Franklin: So has being first trumped being right?
 
Mike Wise: Oh, yeah. There’s almost no penalty for being wrong now if you come back. If your crawl line says this guy’s been traded, along CNN or ESPN or anywhere, there’s almost no repercussions about being wrong if you can say how you screwed up within 10 minutes. And that part’s a little alarming to me, too. It used to be, if you screwed up, I had something wrong in The New York Times once, it was a small thing, but I spent two hours in my editor’s office, and they asked me, ‘How did you screw that up?’ And I had to explain to them. And I don’t feel that there’s that kind of accountability anymore. And so, on the flip side, I’ve got to learn that blogs, Twitter, all these devices, are in essence moving news, that not all our news is going to be gathered out of the morning newspaper anymore. It just isn’t. It isn’t even going to be gathered on our websites. It’s going to be evolving within seconds.
 
Tim Franklin: And that leads into my next question — and by the way, I’m going to open it up to the audience here in about 10 or 15 minutes. So in response to this incident, profootballtalk.com editor Mike Florio, who you mentioned a minute ago …
 
Mike Wise: Great guy. (laughter).
 
Tim Franklin: … told NPR, “He (Wise) has no understanding whatsoever of how this new media world operates. … If Mike Wise had made that assertion in an item printed in The Washington Post and delivered to your doorstep, what should anyone have done to verify what he said in there? Should he have been called up to say, ‘Is this a hoax? Are you trying to prove a broader social point here?’  How do you respond to that point? Do journalists and legacy media organizations understand the new media world and how it works?
 
Mike Wise: Not all of us. I think he’s right in that there’s some parts of it I don’t understand. The best lesson of all, a couple of things I’ve found from this, is one, nobody calls you anymore to see what you were actually thinking, they just write. Including people in the sports journalism industry. I was very depressed when I read a column from Dave Kindred, a guy who I went out to lunch with and asked him, ‘How do you be a columnist in Washington? I looked up to you for years.’ And it would’ve been nice if Dave Kindred called me and said, ‘I don’t agree with what you did, and by the way, it was stupid, but I’m gonna write a column about this. Can I talk to you?’ The next thing I know I’m reading a column, and that part of it bugged the hell out of me.
 
Tim Franklin: Was that column on our site?
 
Mike Wise: Yes. And the other thing that bugged me, another lesson that I learned from it, was one of A.J.’s writers, he said Mike Wise didn’t understand his own level of credibility. And there’s something to that. As much as newspapers and ESPN and every big news organization wants you to be out there promoting your stories, wants you to be part of the social media set, whereas before you’re supposed to hide behind the byline and be the quiet guy and observe, now you’ve got to promote yourself, go on CNN, do all these interviews, there’s still people who want or expect credibility from certain news organizations, and if I had taken myself as serious as they took me, I wouldn’t have gotten myself in that kind of trouble. And that part of it was a great lesson for me.
 
Tim Franklin: Interesting. Great point. So Ashley, if you had been at your desk at Channel 8 and you had seen Mike’s tweet when it happened, and let’s hypothetically say it was something involving an Indianapolis Star Twitter account and Peyton Manning instead of Ben Roethlisburger, how would you have handled it? Would you have gone on the air immediately? Would you have made phone calls? What would you have done?
 
Ashley Adamson: Yeah, well, not that, a situation similar to that, but something somewhat similar to that happened recently. First of all, yeah, we would’ve made phone calls. If you see something on Twitter, I think you can get a lot of story ideas and a lot of things are broken on Twitter, but I don’t think you necessarily would take something at face value that somebody can tweet out in 140 characters.
 
But, ironically enough I have a Twitter account through work, and I didn’t realize it but they linked it to the WISH-TV sports page, so that now every — and they didn’t tell me this, which I wish they had, every tweet that I send out comes up on the sports page. So I kind of tempered and pick and choose what I tweet about now. But the way I figured out that it was done was I had either retweeted, I think I retweeted something from the Indianapolis Star. I actually think it was an article from Bob Kravitz that was a really good article that I wanted to share. Because that’s what Twitter’s all about: You read something and you want people to be able to read it. And I immediately got a message after I retweeted that, that the Star is our competition and I shouldn’t be retweeting the Star. And I thought, that person that texted me that doesn’t even have a Twitter account, so I don’t know how they found out that I just did that. So it was kind of a good lesson to me in that — and I disagree on that. I completely disagree. I think that if Bob has a great article that I think I’d like to pass along to the people that follow me on Twitter, I think I should be able to do that. Maybe it’s a little bit different if they’re breaking an injury news story or something like that, maybe that’s a different line, but yeah, I think if you see something on Twitter, I don’t think it’s something that you go immediately with on the air. I think that you know who to make phone calls to try to get it confirmed, which as you know with the Colts, is a lot harder.
 
Tim Franklin: So even if it was Bob Kravitz, who’s in the audience tonight, tweeting from a Star account, you still would’ve verified it before you went with the story?
 
Ashley Adamson: Yes.
 
Tim Franklin: Alright, so speaking of social networking, Rob, you had to suspend your popular columnist Bill Simmons last fall for making what you determined as inappropriate comments toward a Boston radio host at a station that had a partnership with ESPN. Those comments included jabs describing show hosts as “2 washed up athletes and a 60 yr-old fat guy with no neck” and “deceitful scumbags.” Could you discuss that decision, and then the social networking policies that you subsequently established at ESPN?
 
Rob King: Well, it’s backwards. We had the social networking policies established prior to the incident with WEEI. And when we did that, we made it clear to everybody two things: First, that we really do care about being in the social media space. We think it’s an important means of communicating with the audience and an important means of letting people know the whereabouts of really good content. So we think we want to own it. But we also wanted to make sure that people understood that if you say, ‘Here’s a social media policy,’ or a set of guidelines, and 400 people are in the room, 400 people are going to think, read those guidelines differently, separately. And when we publish those things, we publish them again, republish them, so everybody has a sense of what it is we’re trying to achieve in the social media space.
 
And we had the classic reactions. Kenny Mayne hadn’t seen them yet and he tweeted, ‘Hearing of a Taliban-like creed coming down regarding social media.’ And Ric Bucher fired off some similar thing. And it was before anybody had a chance to see what the guidelines were. And I know that sort of twists this a little bit, and I said this earlier today, I think this social media guidelines thing is a red herring.
 
Tim Franklin: How so?
 
Rob King: Well, it’s new and it’s technology and it’s something that’s been developing for the last three years, so it’s the reason why we have to have these conversations. No it’s not. If you have the opportunity to talk to a broad audience, and you represent a brand — a television network, a website, or whatever it is, a newspaper — you’re on. You couldn’t walk in front of a live mic and just say whatever you wanted to say. That’s essentially what we’re trying to tell people. You’re still our paid representatives of this brand. And just because they were able to set up the account on their own in individual places whether on the phone or in front of the computer, does not mean that it’s not still a matter of being public in front of your audience.
 
The other thing that I think is off about this, is I didn’t suspend Bill because of a violation of social media usage. We have pretty well known guidelines internally about media criticism. And one of the, we don’t post them, but we talk about them definitely. We just got to put it on paper, because otherwise it would be online somewhere. But part of it just gets down to being mean. You don’t take mean shots. If you disagree with something that you read or see it on air and you want to quote it verbatim, have at it. That’s within our guidelines. Because how are you going to have the sports guy not comment on viewing sports through media?
 
And nobody understands these guidelines better than Bill. No one. And that’s why I give him as much leeway — I give him more leeway than a lot of folks — about where the line is. And I take heat for having slippery standards where that’s concerned. But he doesn’t have too many people following him on Twitter because he’s just writing vanilla subject and verb. He actually writes with passion and color and he’s smart and he’s funny and he’s a unique character. But he knows better than anybody where the line is. And when I called him, he knew where he was on that side of the line. He knew.
 
Tim Franklin: So what was his response? I messed up?
 
Rob King: Well, I think he had two responses. Yeah, the response for me was like, ‘Yeah, I hear you.’ But on the other hand he said, ‘These guys have been taking shots at me, and they’re supposed to be our business partners, and I want to know what’s up with that.’ And I think I said this publicly. You know, I had a conversation with our folks in the radio division, who established this partnership with WEEI, and they got on the phone with WEEI and said, ‘What are you doing?’ A lot of folks are apt to know that he got suspended because we had a partnership. That was not the path. And it had nothing to do with that. It had everything to do with the stakes for Bill Simmons are higher than just about anybody.
 
I want him to succeed at every opportunity. And I want him to be out there, and I want him to live blog and have people sort of reading it and their toes are curled up because they know something’s coming up that nobody else has writing and nobody else will say. And that’s what makes him interesting. That’s what makes him, in my view, the best. And I want him to succeed. So he can not trip up over something that is laid out for everybody that is easy opportunity for somebody to point their finger and say, ‘Oh, he’s out of control. Shame on him.’
 
Mike Wise: Excuse me, Rob. So he actually responded and did this because these guys have been taking shots at him …
 
Rob King: Correct.
 
Mike Wise: Which, I mean, if there’s any great lesson I learned in the whole thing, I started that whole thing that day because Florio had taken a shot at me. Don’t use Twitter as a weapon. Or social media as a weapon. It’s so easy to use that stuff as a weapon.
 
Rob King: Seriously, we have allowed ourselves to be so distracted by the notion that people are using either 140 characters or a blog or something just to get at each other. They were, used to be people would just throw down in the press box. And some people would go to the press box, but people would throw down in the tunnel, the athletes would be yelling at people. Sometimes you’d get on camera and be all excited about it. There’s a lot that goes on now that’s sort of distanced. And at ESPN, it’s one of those cases where we’ve said, ‘Look, we don’t like it when it’s directed at us. We don’t like it when it’s done to us. Why are we going to set up standards that are going to allow us to go too far with others?’ And, again, one of the reasons why I’m so proud to be a colleague of Bill’s, is that he’s extremely passionate, and he experiences a range of feedback, a range of criticism. A ton of people are watching everything he does. So it does take something for him to get there. And he would tell you that one of the things he’d tell you he was doing was standing up for himself.
 
Now, subsequently, and not too long ago I think, he tweeted, there was a back-and-forth about Sports Illustrated, this was I think last week. Sports Illustrated, and I’m not even sure who it was, and internally we had conversations about, where are we with our media guidelines? Because Richard Deitsch of Sports Illustrated challenged one of our PR people. And my point of view on that was, well, first of all, if you really look at our standards, this fell within our standards, so let’s take that off. Is it that you don’t like how we talked about use of social media in this case? Again, people get this stuff so mixed up, and it’s so easy to say, ‘Oh, social media guidelines, you’re either going to stand behind them or your now. You’re either going to hold to them or you’re not.’ No one in here is the same person from tweet to tweet. No one. One second you’re snarky, the next you’re trying to let people know that something really cool happened. Then you’re happy. Then something bad happened and you want to take on the world. It’s nonsense.
 
And the social media guidelines, when we published them, said, ‘Alright, now this is evolution. It’s not revolution, it’s evolution.’ We don’t know what this looks like. We don’t even know if you’re going to be using Twitter or Facebook in three years. It could be a location-based thing. I see talent, on-air talent, not just ESPN, using Foursquare and telling people, ‘Hey, I’m at such-and-such airport.’ And I just want to turn on the news and wait until the axe murder gets to them. Because they don’t know what the hell they’re doing. They do not know what they’re doing. They’re just given this tool and they’re broadcasting like it’s a live mic, and they’re out of control.
 
So to the extent that we try to bring some measure of conversation to the front, I think we’re successful. To the extent that the incident back in November was less about social media and policies that Bill deals with every time he writes, or every one of our columnists deals with every time he or she writes, or somebody thinks about every time they get in front of a mic, I mean, really, that’s what the communication was. And I want that to be clear, because it’s, again, too easy to say, ‘Oh, it’s the digital media age.’ If there were not digital media, Gawker and A.J. and a whole community of people would still be trying to serve an audience through some platform. Let’s not get carried away because it’s digital or it’s new or it’s social media or any of that other stuff.
 
Tim Franklin: OK, one more question for A.J. and then a general question for all of you, and then I’m going to turn it over. A.J., in an interview you did last spring for the student paper of Allegheny College, you reportedly said you didn’t believe there should be different sets of ethics for print and online, but you also recognized distinct differences between blogs and newspapers. You said, “I don’t use the fact that it’s a blog as a cop-out to be libelously reckless… We just go after the things that are (mostly) dismissed by traditional news organizations.” So you’ve already stated how some of your rules differ from some of the others on the panel. Do you feel in some ways you are operating under the same ethical guidelines as ESPN? Do you feel some online media are allowed to be different from mainstream media organizations?
 
A.J. Daulerio: Well, I just think we’re in a really tough spot because I don’t think it’s fair to put us either in a blog category or in a traditional journalist category. We’re kind of undefined because we do take advantage of both lines whenever necessary. But right now I like to say we’re a work in progress. I mean, the main point of what we’re trying to do is not to get sued. I mean, that’s what it comes down to, boils down to.
 
Tim Franklin: How’s that going so far?
 
A.J. Daulerio: Badly (laughter). But I mean, within that, it’s really tough to kind of just say there are things that we do that I can’t stand up and hold over any other kind of great publication that’s out there, and then it’s also tough to say that we’ve done some stuff that make all blogs look horrible. So, I mean, I think I understand that where we are, just in the place of how a lot of people perceive us, as one that can go either way. But I think right now we’re going to be a work in progress and try to do as best we can without having to deal with Sean Salisbury ever again.
 
Tim Franklin: Last question and then I’m turning it over to you. Have your questions ready. Mike we’ll start with you: How do you see this sorting out, this kind of historic transformation period that we’re in right now. Do you see traditional outlets like The Washington Post changing its standards to be competitive online, or do you think the Post ultimately wins by continuing to be The Washington Post and that eventually your credibility you’ve built over the decades wins out?
 
Mike Wise: I think if we don’t change some we miss the boat on evolving contemporary media. I think it would be a shame if we didn’t understand the nuances of whatever it is, Facebook, Twitter and the use of blogs on a daily basis in incorporating those into stories later, there will be a newspaper. I also believe, one of the reasons I got Sports Illustrated for 20 years when I was a kid, was because I knew whether that story took me one sitting or five on the toilet, I was going to get the definitive story on Sonny Liston, and I was going to either feel something — whether it was laugh, cry or whatever — I was going to feel something.
 
And the moment that Sports Illustrated tried to be ESPN Magazine and made their index box and their weekly roundups like a video game, like you almost needed a remote control to find out what page something was on, that’s where they lost me. And that’s to your point of, keep doing what you do. If you do what you do right and you’re who you are, I think there’s still an audience for that. Now, in the case of The Washington Post that audience may be dead, but nonetheless, I just think that even contemporary Washington Post readers, if you give them what you want and you confine to those standards, you’re going to be fine. Gawker might be able to change the name of Deadspin to Dongspin. I cannot call Katharine Graham’s relatives and say, ‘Can you guys call this the Washington Penis?’ They’re not going to do it. They’re not going to do it.
 
Tim Franklin: I think that’s a safe assumption.
 
Mike Wise: Because that’s not who they are. But A.J.’s people can get away with it. I might read it more. But I just think, to your point, be who you are.
 
Tim Franklin: A.J., how do you see this next few, next year, two years, three years along?
 
A.J. Daulerio: Well, I don’t know. I’ve never been one to kind of say that all print is dead and destined to fail. Because I think even online right now is going through this process of still kind of trying to have a new identity. Twitter’s really changed the way blogs work as well. So everybody I think has to just keep up to pace, but also not be as stubborn and rigid that the things that they did before are the only way where it can be done. I think everybody just needs to be aware of how information is going to be processed at this point. And as we’ve seen in the last two years, things change very rapidly right now. So I’m sitting on the same sidelines as everybody else.
 
Tim Franklin: OK, Ashley?
 
Ashley Adamson: You know, I think that if any of us knew how it would all play out then we could all quit our jobs and go do that and make a lot of money. It’s hard to say how things are going to play out. I do know that, kind of the point that A.J. made, I’ve worked for a couple local stations that have really fought back against the social media and how things have changed, and it put them back for a while. The first station I worked at full time in Syracuse, N.Y., they didn’t want Facebook. They didn’t want any of that stuff. And now, that’s like their thing.
 
And it took a little while, and I think I even notice it now that my boss is telling me they want me to blog more, they want me to talk about how I feel about certain things, and before that was never what you were supposed to do as a journalist. You were never supposed to let people know how you felt. So I think that’s changed, and I think that’s changed partially because the audience, rightly or wrongly, wanted to know you as a person and what you think about certain things and what your take is. So I think it’s supply and demand. I think there are going to be people out there who think Deadspin is a great site and hilarious, and they’re going to check that. But they’re going to read The Washington Post and ESPN.com. And I think that if you know what you’re going to, the different platforms, that that’s a good thing.
 
Tim Franklin: OK, alright, Rob, we’ll give you the final word on this topic.
 
Rob King: Well, all indications tell me that this is going to be less about the actual content, and more about the delivery systems. And you guys will make the decision about where it all goes. Everybody in here has a phone that does more than make phone calls. And everybody in here has got some measure of personalizing the contact lists and all of you are getting news in different ways. So some of are getting it off a Twitter feed, some of you have an RSS feed set up, and I think that what we’ve seen in the last few years and what we’re going to continue to see, is if our businesses are built on broadcasting to a large audience, we’re missing the point.
 
It’s turning into a massive audience of individuals, where anybody who’s got an iPhone or has got an iPad knows that you’ve no sooner passed that off to somebody to use, because first of all they’d take it and say, ‘These aren’t even my fingerprints. Gross!’ But it’s just that personal. And I think that if, A.J.’s exactly right, if you’re an online site, a lot of times, if you sit there thinking people are going to come to your homepage for content, you’re kidding yourself. If you’re not building your site to actually delivering results to your search engines, or if you’re not figuring out ways to push the message out through alerts to mobile products, you are missing the point. And a lot of people, a lot of businesses are trying to figure out, ‘Hey, you know, you should be on Facebook and tell everybody what you think. We’re turning you into an individual broadcast network.’ It’s not really about that.
 
The most important person in this exchange is now not the person who is creating the content. It’s you. You’re all creating and owning your own worlds. And what’s going to have to happen is we’re going to have to look at every single thing we do, everything we do. If we’re moving video across the Internet and you’re sending big widescreen shot of a game and it doesn’t look good on your mobile device, we have failed. If you’ve got interest in teams that extend beyond your immediate geographic area, or you’ve moved to a certain collegiate space and you’re a fan, not regionally, but we’re sending stuff to your zip code, we have failed. We haven’t learned how to give one-to-one communication. And I think what’s happening in the social media spaces, you guys are creating your own me network, right? And you need to get with me and understand me and get me what I want, or else you’re losing me. I just want to say this really quickly: How many people here today bought a newspaper? See, now look at you.
 
Mike Wise: That’s not too bad.
 
Rob King: No, do it again! Do it again! Look at the generational split, alright? Look at the generational split. So when we’re looking in the future, not talking about you and me. You guys have made a different determination as to what this is going to be. And that is happening not in the future. That’s happening now.