In the sports world, because ESPN has been (not for long) the only 24 hour sports network, the Mothership was where all the news used to break. If you wanted to know the latest rumors and breaking deals, you had to go to ESPN.
Nowadays, thanks to Twitter, other sports reporters have an opportunity to break sports news and now ESPN is falling far behind the crowd in its reporting. I've talked earlier about how the best investigative reporting has been done by Yahoo and Sports Illustrated in recent years. ESPN seems to more of an entertainment network than an actual news network.
That's fine with me. However, what isn't fine with me is how ESPN has begun to grab credit for breaking news stories it has no business claiming credit for. Have you noticed how many headlines on espn.com or on the headlines at the bottom of ESPN or ESPN News start a breaking news story with "Sources say..."
It's annoying. If you go on twitter, you can see almost every day another non-ESPN reporter breaking a story and about 3-5 minutes later, the corresponding-sport ESPN reporter announcing "breaking" news by quoting unnamed "sources."
AwfulAnnouncing has a nice story on this issue and how other sports reporters from around the industry are starting to openly criticize ESPN for the policy. It's lazy reporting, and something that you wouldn't have expected from ESPN even a few years ago. However, this is the company that aired "The Decision," and it seems like a new direction for ESPN that they don't care who breaks news as long as they can somehow take credit for it.
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