Detailed Investigative Report On College Sports Recruiting Violations Dismissed As 'Blog' Story

from the sorta-missing-the-point... dept

We've been pointing out that just because journalism is moving away from print newspapers, it doesn't take away from investigative journalism, at all. In fact, we've seen how there are a number of new online investigative journalism operations that are moving in to pick up the slack. In fact, in the sports realm, it's been pointed out before that the best sports journalists are getting snapped up left and right (for much higher salaries) by the various online entities, and they're still doing tremendous investigative reporting work. Just last week, Dan Wetzel and Adrian Wojnarowski, both well-respected sports writers with pretty long resumes in the field, broke a story about how UConn had violated recruiting rules.

It had everything that a typical investigative report should include. It involved a six-month investigation, and the amount of background and detail is quite impressive. It's exactly what an investigative report should be, even if it was published only online and there were no subscribers who had to "pay" to make it happen. It seems to pretty clearly disprove the idea that the only way to fund investigative journalism is to have it paid for by subscribers. That's never actually been true in the past, but it's even clearer with this story.

Still, perhaps the most ridiculous part of the story, as pointed out by one of our readers, Dave, is that the basketball coach who was implicated for recruiting violations in the story, Jim Calhoun, decided that, rather than respond to the allegations, he could dismiss them entirely because they appeared online only:

It was a newspaper story that ... it wasn't a newspaper, I'm sorry. It was a blog story that appeared, I guess, in something I probably can't get a hold of, which is Yahoo! And very simply my comments are what I said.

So, this guy thinks that since the publishing of an in-depth investigative report happened in an online only source (a) it's obviously "a blog story" (even though it wasn't) and (b) it can be waved off. Of course, now that the story isn't just appearing on "a blog" -- it's appearing in the NY Times and the NY Daily News and the Boston Globe, among many other print newspapers -- maybe he'll admit that perhaps it's an issue?

Investigative reporting is investigative reporting, whether it happens online or in a newspaper. Journalists (and investigation subjects) who ignore that do so at their own peril.

Filed Under: adrian wojnarowski, blog, dan wetzel, investigative reporting, jim calhoun, journalism, online, recruiting violations, uconn
Companies: yahoo