WE’RE KEEPING SCORE, STARTING NOW

Jay Glazer of FOX has called for the keeping of a media scorecard so many times this week that we need a scorecard just to keep track of the number of times he’s called for keeping a scorecard. And so we’ve decided to begin keeping a scorecard. If for no reason other than to shut him up. It’s not going to be anything fancy, with levels or points or whistles or bells. And the only subjectivity involved will be whether the story is sufficiently significant to merit inclusion. The relevant factors listed will be the scoop, the person who broke it, whether it was confirmed by a credible independent media outlet (OK, that will require some subjectivity as well), whether it was confirmed or denied by the persons involved, and whether the report was accurate, inaccurate, or inconclusive. We’re doing this in part because we’re already actively gathering the stories in an independent, equal-opportunity-asshole fashion, putting us in the unique position of translating the stories as they emerge into a running tally. The tipping point for us was that the source at ESPN who shared with us the internal “DO NOT REPORT OR YOU WILL TERMINATED IN THE LITERAL MEANING OF THE PHRASE” memo strongly advised us to do it. “ESPN has this tendency to disregard Glazer’s and Schefter’s reports until Mort or Clayton confirm them,” the source said earlier this morning. “The funny thing is that ESPN will then take credit for breaking those stories. Not sure why we have the need to do that? Mort and Clayton break plenty of stories and deserve credit for those, but they are never going to break every story. Crazy. “You should keep tabs of the items and who broke them and their accuracy. An actual tally might stop ESPN from its current tactics of claiming to have reported everything first.” And so we will. We’d been hesitant to do this because we know that, in order to do it right, it’ll take some real effort and attention to detail. Since neither is our strong suit, we’ll be relying on PFT Planet to help ensure that we’re catching all the stories, and we’ll also be relying on you to help us determine whether a given story merits inclusion in the scorecard. We’ll set up a separate Turd Watch-style page for tracking the scoops, and we’ll from time to time comment on the then-current results. For starters, we need to come up with a good list of reporters to include. Here’s our work-in-progress roster: Jay Glazer of FOX, Chris Mortensen of ESPN, Adam Schefter of NFLN, Peter King of too many media outlets to list, John Clayton of ESPN, Alex Marvez of FOX, Michael Smith of ESPN, Michael Silver of Yahoo!, Jason Cole of Yahoo!, Charley Casserly of CBS. (Let us know who we’re missing, or whether any of these guys shouldn’t be included.) The exercise begins Sunday and runs through the Super Bowl. We’ll then decide whether to keep it going, or whether to change it or expand it.