in

Sports Illustrated updates “USC to dismiss Helton” story three days later – Awful Announcing, Awfulannouncing.com

Sports Illustrated updates “USC to dismiss Helton” story three days later – Awful Announcing, Awfulannouncing.com


On Sunday,Sports Illustratedfeatured a report from “USC Maven” Adam Maya (one of the team-centric independent writers featured on main SI channels as part ofnew operator The Maven’sbusiness plan) on their website and social channels, with that report stating that multiple sources had told Maya USC was going to fire football coach Clay Helton. Actual SI staffer Pat Fordeposted on Twitterlater Sunday that multiple sources disputed Maya’s report and said no decision had been made, and other national reporters put out similar reports, leading to SI running a “staff report” that mentioned the sources disputing Maya’s initial report, but they didn’t change the original piece or take it down.

Then, on Wednesday, after USC officially announced that they were in fact keeping Helton, Maya’s initial piece was finally scrubbed from the internet andreplaced with an apology from Maya and a discussion of what went wrong. But that didn’t happen immediately. As many noted, there was a while wherethe SI USC team page(it’s since been changed) featured the actual news and then the incorrect report, both on the main website and on mobile. Here’s what that looked like on the main website Wednesday afternoon:

Sports Illustrated's USC page on Dec. 4, 2019.

Here’s what it looked like on mobile:

Wel it’s official: SI has become a complete and total joke. These are the top two articles on their USC page, back to back.@ BarstoolSC@ awfulannouncing@ Theoldp@ uscpsychopic.twitter.com/uQ2QijzYZL

– Greg Scharlach (@usc_greg)December 4, 2019

This isn’t the only weird and / or anachronistic thing with SI team pages. For example,their general team landing pagestill (as of Wednesday night) features a “Latest” section of videos on the right, with two of the top three featuring Mark May for some reason. The second of those is May proclaiming that Urban Meyer to USC is “a done deal,” something that held up about as well as the usual comments from May.Bothofthose May links go to SI URLs posted on October 4 that now produce 404 errors. Here’s what that part of the page looked like Wednesday:

Mark May is back...making inaccurate videos linked on SI.

But that’s a little less big of a deal; that’s hardly the “latest from NCAAF,” or anything you should be featuring in the first place, but it’s a video list on what’s probably a seldom-used page. By contrast, Maya’s story was rolled out far and wide across SI’s platforms, which is why it became so notable. And it’s good that it’s finally been corrected with an apology; here are some key elementsfrom that:

I was wrong, and I am sorry.

Those seven words cannot exonerate me from the mistake I made this week – incorrectly reporting Clay Helton would be fired – but I felt they were the first that belonged in this statement.

I know many are wondering how I came to write my initial story Sunday that Helton would be dismissed. If you’ve followed my work, you know it’s a situation I’ve been tracking the entire season. Fast forward to this past weekend and I was told by multiple sources that USC had decided to make a coaching change. These same sources had alerted me to three developments in the past – athletic director Mike Bohn’s hiring, Bru McCoy’s transfer back to USC, and Graham Harrell becoming the offensive coordinator.

I’m not going to out my sources – this is my sword to fall on – but essentially there was a misunderstanding on their end as it pertained to Helton’s status. They confused certain actions by Bohn and their superiors at USC, especially in the previous week or so, to mean Helton was definitely being fired, when in actuality keeping him was still under consideration.

As a result, a coaching change was inaccurately characterized to me as being a formality rather than, as was later explained to me, conditional. If I had known the latter, I would not have filed my report in such terms. Given my sources’ track record, I had no reason to think their intel in this instance was incomplete. I fully believed in what I reported, which is why I was so definitive. Alas, I made a major error that assuredly caused great pain to a coach I couldn’t respect more as a person, and his family.

Look, erroneous reports happen at all publications. Some of the best journalists make mistakes from misunderstanding sources (see Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’sdiscussionof misunderstanding if HR Haldeman was mentioned before the Watergate grand jury). And in this case, the error on Maya’s end isn’t even misunderstanding sources, it’s the sources being wrong. But when you use anonymous sources, you’re replacing their credibility with your own, and these sources apparently weren’t in a position to know what was actually happening, so running a report as definitive as “USC to dismiss Helton” based on that was certainly a mistake from Maya.

But mistakes happen, and they often happen around coaching changes, especially in fluid situations. And sometimes the situation actually changes based on reaction to what’s reported, as appears to have happenedwith Les Miles’ firing / not-firing at LSU in 2015and what happened withGreg Schiano’s recent hiring / not-hiring / hiring at Rutgers. That doesn’t appear to be quite the case here (the evidence suggests that USC decision-makers really hadn’t come to a consensus on Helton at the time of Maya’s report, not that they’d decided to fire Helton and then changed course ), but a misstep on a coaching hire wouldn’t necessarily be huge news in its own right.

This was a notable mistake, though, especially because of how much play Maya’s initial story got (thanks to it being pushed across SI’s channels), and because of how much focus there currently is on how the SI / Maven setup will work. And SI / Maven made this much worse with the delay in retracting and correcting the first report; yes, they ran the aggregated reporting disputing it in a separate post, but they didn’t alter that initial story until Wednesday, long after it had been proven inaccurate. And that’s a problem; yes, more people were going to see the newer post with more accurate information, but just keeping the older one around unaltered was a bad look, and not great for anyone who stumbled on that post instead of the wide internet refutation of it.

Every organizationmakesmistakes, includingthe old SI, but a key part of that ishow they handle their corrections and updates. Some handle it well, and somedo not. Maya’s eventual apology is good, and it’s appreciated that he spells out what went wrong here, but it shouldn’t have taken this long for that inaccurate report to be corrected.

[Sports Illustrated]

Recent Posts

ESPN

ESPN goes 0-for-4 on team logos for NBA Friday promo

Pelicans-Rockets and Mavericks-Suns are * not * the scheduled ESPN games. But those are definitely their logos.

Local Networks

49 ers suspend radio analyst Tim Ryan for “dark skin color with a dark football” comment on Lamar Jackson fake handoffs

“He’s really good at that fake, Lamar Jackson, but when you consider his dark skin color with a dark football with a dark uniform, you could not see that thing.”

League Networks

Ryan Callahan talks joining NHL Network, captains and coaches, and his disappointment that NHL players may miss the Olympics

“I think it’s a shame, to be honest with you, that the players aren’t participating in the Olympics. I know when I got a chance to be in two Olympics, it’s probably the highlight of my career. “

MLB

Fundraiser launched for Baseball Prospectus writer Jen Mac Ramos’ recovery after car crash

Ramos and husband Josh Eisen were struck by a car on Highway 99 in Fresno early Sunday morning, killing Eisen and severely injuring Ramos. Ramos’ family is raising money to help with recovery.

ESPN

The PR battle over college football pregame show ratings is so stupid

This past Saturday, we finally got a college football pregame show battle worth talking about. ESPN’s College GameDay …

Brave Browser
Read More
Payeer

What do you think?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

GIPHY App Key not set. Please check settings

Mocked Abroad and Assailed at Home, Trump Returns to Face Impeachment – The New York Times, The New York Times

Mocked Abroad and Assailed at Home, Trump Returns to Face Impeachment – The New York Times, The New York Times

Asian stocks rebound on renewed hopes of US-China trade deal – CNN, CNN

Asian stocks rebound on renewed hopes of US-China trade deal – CNN, CNN