Facing the “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” reality of the new media, newspapers are mimicking web sites and blogs.
In many respects, it’s good.
In some respects, it isn’t.
Because newspapers still carry a certain amount of weight (and maybe they shouldn’t), the stuff they say gets repeated and magnified and often taken as fact.
Case in point: We’ve received plenty of e-mails this morning regarding “reports” of former Bengals receivers coach Hue Jackson returning to Cincinnati as offensive coordinator.
The last we checked, however, the Bengals have an offensive coordinator, Bob Bratkowski.
So what the hell is going on?
Well, it started with Mike Preston of the Baltimore Sun suggesting in a Sunday blog entry that “Jackson is . . . being approached by Bengals coach Marvin Lewis to become Cincinnati’s offensive coordinator.” Preston offered no details or citations to support the notion that Lewis would be firing or demoting Bratkowski and bringing Jackson back to town.
Enter the Cincinnati Enquirer, which seized on this single sentence and converted it into a full-blown article.
And so, because it’s now appearing in the Enquirer, it’s being regarded as the truth.
It remains to be seen whether there’s any actual accuracy to these reports. And that’s fine; plenty of stuff that appears here and on other web sites and blogs are couched as rumor and possibility, not fact and certainty.
The lesson is that it requires the readers to have a more discerning eye when it comes to reading the local rags that follow specific NFL teams. Just because a newspaper is saying something doesn’t mean that the newspaper is “reporting” it.