journalism Page 26 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Why'd The <em>Cincy Enquirer</em> Pull A Story About Arrest Of Reds Owner's Son?
On Monday, the Cincinnati Enquirer published a story about Robert and Deanna Castellini being arrested on domestic violence charges. A day later, the story was pulled from the paper's website. Robert Castellini, as the original article's headline points out, happens to be the son of Cincinnati Reds ...

Mets Reporter Admits He Stumped For Ike Davis Because He's Likable
New York Daily News baseball writer Andy Martino published a unique notes column earlier this week. It's an introspective look at a question reporters probably don't ask themselves enough: Do they spin their reporting to favor athletes they like?...

How Dan Snyder Bought Off The D.C. Media
In 2000, then-editor Wes Pruden of the Washington Times blasted Dan Snyder's efforts to control the flow of information about the Redskins as "chickenshit" tactics....

What About The Maturation Of Peter King?
The first item in Peter King's latest MMQB column is about Panthers quarterback Cam Newton and "maturation." Specifically, it is about how one of the NFL's most important figures refuses to set aside childish things and instead wallows in a state of doltish adolescence. When, the reader is left to...

Meta Analysis: How Many Licks To Reach The Center Of A Tootsie Pop?
The world may never know how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. But we can at least use data to make an educated guess....

ESPN's <em>First Take</em> Opens With Horseshit Apology From Stephen A. Smith
This morning's Very Special Edition of First Take began with a scripted and seemingly pre-recorded apology from panelist Stephen A. Smith regarding the very dumb things he said about domestic violence last week. It was ... unconvincing....

How Frequently Does <em>The New York Times</em> Use "Fart," "Poop," And "Butt"?
This here is a tool that looks up the frequency of words used in the New York Times, both in the percentage of and how many total articles the word appeared in. We put it to terrible use. ...

Tennis Writer Neil Harman Is Guilty Of Weapons-Grade Plagiarism
Earlier today, we told you about tennis writer Neil Harman admitting that at least some portion of the official Wimbledon yearbook he publishes every year was plagiarized. The full breadth of The Times of London's chief tennis correspondent's plagiarism is now beginning to come into focus, thanks to...

Respected Tennis Writer Cops To Plagiarism; There's Likely More To Find
Neil Harman has been The Times of London's chief tennis correspondent since 2002, during which time he has been awarded the Sports Journalist Association's "Sports News Reporter of the Year" award, as well as the ATP's Ron Bookman Award for Media Excellence. He is also, as he admitted in a letter ...

The Top 200 Ways Bleacher Report Screwed Me Over
A month before I turned 21, I returned home from the Bay Area, where I was attending college, to celebrate Thanksgiving with my family in Minnesota. On a Tuesday evening, I was sitting in the living room, about to head upstairs to go to bed, when my phone buzzed with a text from Dave Finocchio, fo...

How To Legitimize Bigotry: Embrace Debate
This morning, Stephen A. Smith and Skip Bayless shouted at each other about Tony Dungy's comments that Michael Sam's sexuality would be an overriding distraction in an NFL locker room, and whether it was a bigger distraction that Michael Vick's return from prison. I'm sorry, that's the worst sente...

Brett Favre Unqualified To Discuss Safety Of Football, Says Sportswriter
Only the parents of boys are welcome in the discussion of whether it's unsafe to let children play football. So says Mike Florio, a collectible commemorative helmet-phone in the employ of NBC Sports, who's mad at Brett Favre for expressing reservations about whether he'd encourage his non-existent ...

We'll Pay You To Read The Tampa Bay Bucs' Longform Advertorial
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have put something terrible on the internet, a 32,000-word piece of what we can only assume is advertorial content presented as the kind of #longform journalism that is meant to get Serious Readers stiff. ...

Who Actually Got The LeBron James Scoop?
LeBron James returning to the Cleveland Cavaliers was something well beyond a huge sports story; it was an immaculately executed public relations coup that added probably hundreds of millions of dollars to the economic impact of the single most valuable player in American sports. And dangling off ...

Here Is The Worst Lede About Chicago Gun Violence. We Tried To Top It.
Cal Thomas, a syndicated columnist who is employed by Tribune Media, recently wrote about the ongoing gun violence in Chicago. This is how the article begins, complete with typo:...

How Cleveland And <em>Sports Illustrated</em> Won The LeBron James Sweepstakes
As it happens, LeBron James's free agency, conducted under seemingly total radio silence, kicked off in earnest exactly when everyone thought it did: with a Cleveland radio guy reporting that Dan Gilbert's private jet was bound for Miami....

LeBron James Tells The Sports World Exactly What It Wants To Hear
Shortly after LeBron James announced via Sports Illustrated that he was heading back to Cleveland, Yahoo's Adrian Wojnarowski fired off this tweet, which, given the stature of his pronouncements at times like this, had the general air of a collective verdict:...

Just Undo It: The LeBron James Profile That Nike Killed
This profile of LeBron James was reported and written in 2011 for Port, a new London-based men's magazine, under odd circumstances: Nike paid for the writer's travel expenses and a portion of his fee. The story that came out of the trip was not what Nike had expected—a rep was apparently "furious"—...

What Brazil's Loss Meant, And What It Didn't Mean
When you visit the Museu do Futebol in São Paulo, you are at one point obliged to enter a long, narrow, pitch-black room, in which the increasingly loud pounding of a heartbeat plays heavily over concealed speakers as images of the Maracanazo—Brazil's infamous loss in the final of the 1950 World C...

How Two Infamous Ex-ESPNers Benefited From A Bristol VIP's Night Out
One of the most influential men in sports pawing women in a hotel bar in front of a couple enemies with old scores to settle—and much of it surreptitiously captured on video? It sounds like the stuff of an investigation carried out by one of ESPN's harder-charging journalistic franchises. Instead, i...