MMA Journalism Roundtable: Breaking News vs. Accurate News

Welcome back to the second of a ten-part series on MMA media, featuring our amazing guests: Jim Murphy of the Savage Science, Zak Woods of SB Nation and Watch Kalib Run and MMA Opinion’s very own Joshua Stein. Today we’ll be discussing the following question… please leave your own thoughts in the comments section!

One of the problems that we saw, specifically with the semi-recent slieu of Jamie Varner articles that Zac wrote about, is that sometimes even a reliable post that is cited is inaccurate. What responsibility, if any, do MMA writers have to verify information? What if it’s time-sensitive; how does that play in?

Read everyone’s answers after the jump!

Zak Woods:

The immediacy of the internet raises interesting questions. When a revelation occurs the blogosphere will be inundated with immediate reactions and responses. Even if we as writers don’t react the forums and chat rooms will. The key in all of this is who is providing the original information. If it is a new website that I am unfamiliar with then I will sit on it and wait. If it is a trusted site, say a newspaper website, than perhaps I will be more cavalier with my response. It all depends on that original source.

Josh Stein:

The reality of internet news demands fast paced information, it demands being the first one to have articles up. Unfortunately, that results in sloppy journalism. Frankly, it seems like an obligation of intellectually honest individuals to work out what seems credible, but there should be a sense of obligation, on the part of journalists, to be sure that they have their information right. If it’s time sensitive, writers should feel free to post speculative pieces, but it’s important to be honest and up-front about what is speculation and what is confirmed.

This is an issue, not just of some higher, abstract journalistic standard, it’s also about personal credibility and the credibility of internet journalists as a group. If a writer jumps on a piece without confirming it, there’s a risk of looking like an idiot and losing some credibility on the subject. Fact checking is important, just to keep from looking like an incompetent.

Of course, it’s easy to be upset that the mistakes made by the world of internet journalism reflect badly on all of us, as internet journalists, but the reality is that Hanlon’s Razor is deeply imbedded in this profession, and some people are just screw up, and don’t know (or forget) to check their sources when they post a piece. People make mistakes, and that’s a real problem.

Jim Murphy:

Obviously there should be an effort made to be accurate.  Passing vague rumors off as fact is bad form.  On the other hand, the fight business is somewhat unique in that yesterday’s enemies are tomorrow’s business partners.  Fighters and promoters may say one thing on one day and something completely different the next.  Ultimately, it’s all situational—if I write an article that a fighter is a transvestite hooker in his spare time I better well have some exhaustively verified information. Really, even that isn’t really newsworthy unless its impacting his performance in the ring. If a fighter tells me that he’s probably going to fight in the main event of an upcoming card and it gets changed, I’m not losing a lot of sleep over it.  Time sensitivity doesn’t negate this concept—it’s all very situational.

In the recent case of Dana’s tirade against Cro Cop, there were a good many players in the MMA media that rushed to get the story out but they had no intention of putting it into perspective.  There are those who’d repeat it verbatim as fact if Dana White said that Anderson Silva trained by running back and forth across Lake Mead.  Clearly, that’s not good form from a number of standpoints.  Ultimately, we try not to worry about what everyone else is doing.  We try to do a good job and report on the sport in a manner that we think is professional and that we can be proud of.  There’s too much going on to get too self obsessed about the macro view of MMA media.  If someone disagrees with something we’ve said that’s their right. We do very little ‘censorship’ of comments—if we could get away with it and not be inundated with spam I wouldn’t moderate them at all.  The only time I amend comments is to tone down obscenities.  Otherwise, if someone makes a valid point it goes up.  If they have some sort of philosophical issue with what or how we’ve reported on something we’re willing to listen.  Honestly, in the 18 months or so we’ve been online there’s not really been any complaints about our work on philosophical grounds.

There’s been a couple of things where a fighter or someone close to him may have misconstrued what we meant—for example, recently we put up a blog post saying that since Akiyama’s orbital bone was broken he should do the eye patch look like the ‘Hathaway Shirt Guy’ in the 1960’s  Someone thought we were goofing on him and making fun of him, which couldn’t be further from the truth.  The point was that he was cool enough to make an eye injury stylish. In the same post we referred to him as a ‘judo badass’ and ‘the future UFC middleweight champion’. We pointed out the sheer toughness necessary to fight two rounds with a broken eye socket. Hard to be more complementary than that.  We try not to get into fighter bashing or try to make ourselves look clever at their expense.  We have a sense of humor, but so do most of the fighters we’ve met.  Nothing in that post was anything that I wouldn’t say to Akiyama if he were sitting right here and I were fluent in Japanese—my thinking is he’d get a chuckle out of it and take it in the spirit in which we said it.  We’ve actually had several big name fighters commend us on our tone—not to name drop, but one that’s a household name said he likes our site because the humor reminds him of ‘being with a friend busting each other’s balls over some beers.’  It’s not mean spirited, bitter or embarrassing but good natured and respectful.  And we make fun of ourselves in that same spirit—we take what we do very seriously and work hard to do a good job, but again we’re not going to act like we’re embedded Pentagon correspondents.

The informal criteria we have is that ‘we take the sport seriously without taking ourselves too seriously’—we won’t make a joke or goof on a fighter in a way that we’d be embarrassed or afraid to say it to his face.  Still, to ignore that side of the sport is really robbing it of its essence—mentioning something like Josh Barnett’s fondness for comic books and heavy metal isn’t insulting.  It provides an important window into him as an individual and on a larger scale is part of the ‘spice’ that makes fight sports much more interesting to cover than the ‘stick and ball sports’ in my opinion.  Maybe if we don’t get our point across clearly it’s our fault, but again we can’t take responsibility for someone misconstruing what we mean in most cases.

Readers: What do YOU think? Share your thoughts in the comments.