Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 by Adam Wagner
When rumors go wrong
In the Tuesday’s Tribune-Review, there was an article detailing how Penguin officials were dealing with trade rumors, notably one involving Jordan Staal and Marian Hossa. To quote the article directly:
Several team officials found a recently posted Web rumor — center Jordan Staal to Atlanta for winger Marian Hossa — equally hilarious and absurd.
Those Penguin officials may or may not have been laughing at the site you are looking at right now.
This rumor may or may not have originated on this site. Christmas day, we did a post detailing the rumors around the Penguins. At that point in time, one of the rumors was that Ray Shero had called Atlanta about Hossa. Upon reading that rumor, I wrote:
Hossa is an unrestricted free agent at the end of this season, meaning that the Penguins would likely need to resign him before any large-scale trade would occur and that the return would have to be someone who the Penguins expect to cost a pretty high sum (Jordan Staal, maybe?).
Perhaps I am giving myself too much credit, as a rumor involving the same two players originated at Hockey Buzz over the weekend, but if Penguin officials are laughing at us (and even if they are not), I feel as if a defense is necessary.
Blogging is not really respected yet. We are the free media. The people who throw our thoughts out there for the public’s consumption even as we remain a part of that public.
One of the major disadvantages to that is that we do not have the access that some people do to sources. We must, therefore, handle trade rumors and such a little bit differently than major papers. A Dave Molinari or a Don Cherry can break a trade rumor and have that be his story. By the time you come to this site, you more than likely know about the trade rumor and do not want to simply hear what it is again.
It is, therefore, our responsibility to look at how a trade would affect the team in the long and short runs and whether or not it should be made. If we can do this in a compelling manner, we hope that you return to the site on a regular basis. But for a piece of “established media” to publish a semi-attack on the web media is irresponsible journalism.
There are rumors every day, some of which are actually going to come true, many of which are not. The public wants to know about these rumors and wants to be able to discuss them. To state that Penguin officials are laughing at them suggests that websites such as Hockey Buzz are a waste of bandwidth. And in that the Trib would be dead wrong, particularly considering that their rumors commonly come from sites such as Hockey Buzz.
It is a shame that newspapers seem all too wiling to throw the baby out with the bathwater in their assault on blogs. Maybe they could learn something from us. After all, we are not the dying medium. They are.
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