The Jonah Keri Podcast, Episode 23
11 February 2011
My guest today is Sports Illustrated’s Richard Deitsch. Richard covers sports media and other topics for SI and SI.com and hosts the Inside Sports Illustrated Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @RichardDeitsch.
The topics we cover:
- 1:21-3:36: The value (and appeal) of being a jack-of-all-trades
- 3:37-5:46: What does the job of a media critic look like?
- 5:47-11:32: How and when did sports media figures become (almost) as big celebrities and fodder for gossip and reporting as the athletes who play the games?
- 11:33-16:13: How and why do people commit acts of plagiarism in this day and age, where nothing slips through the cracks, you can’t get away with it, and the risks are great?
- 16:14-19:45: If plagiarism doesn’t bring big repercussions, does that mean that the biggest risk to a journalist’s career is to become embroiled in a scandal?
- 19:46-24:11: How are mainstream media outlets doing as far as giving credit to other publications — and especially bloggers — for stories they or analysis they did?
- 24:12-29:01: How has Twitter changed the fan experience? Are we making too big a deal about it, given it’s still just a tiny segment of the population that use it?
- 29:02-30:37: Who owns content on Twitter — the Tweeter, or the site’s owners?
- 30:38-38:09: Is the value of breaking news diminished, given someone else is probably going to report the same thing a minute later?
- 38:10-43:17: Are the moves of Rob Neyer to SB Nation and King Kaufman to Bleacher Report aberrations or the sign of a growing trend?
- 43:18-48:41: Bleacher Report has made big bucks capitalizing in search engine optimization. AOL just bought Huffington Post for $315 million and plans to capitalize on HuffPo’s model of content aggregation and SEO. Are these sustainable, growable trends, or will these trends prove to be a bubble?
- 48:39-51:28: What does the future hold for talented 25-year-olds, sandwiched between media superstars and the Bleacher Report model? Can they make a living in sports media?
- 51:29-57:59: Will the improvement in at-home fan experience put a huge dent in stadium attendance for the major sports leagues?
- 58:00-end: Food Pick of the Week
My pick
Richard’s West Coast pick
Richard’s East Coast pick
Player embedded below. To download, right click here.
Great conversation, guys. I think the discrepancy in punishments is based on potential economic factors. A potential sexual harassment or workplace suit carries far greater risks (financial and publicity-related) than a sports-related plagiarism case. If the offended parties in these journalism cases realistically could bring the case to court, I think stronger penalties would be the result. But newspapers are so afraid of litigation of any kind, that’s not likely to happen any time soon – and that’s before the concept of proving harm. The Mariotti case is special, in that freelance employees are far easier to turf than established, contracted talent.
Does Deitsch’s Jayson Blair/Will Selva comparison bring up the question of whether there are degrees of plagiarism? If there aren’t, then he has a very fair point that the Times firing Blair and ESPN giving Selva a slap on the wrist is a disturbing development. But if there are any degrees whatsoever, then isn’t Deitsch’s comparison not exactly fair — Selva accidentally copied one lead; Blair systematically plagiarized for several months, so it’d logically follow that their punishments wouldn’t be the same.