Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Hey, That Quick Chat Looks Familiar...

Kitt Amundson "has been covering the NHL for over 12 years and is a member of the Professional Hockey Writers Association. In addition to keeping you up to date with the latest happenings in the NHL, she'll take you behind the scenes and in the locker room."

Know what else she'll do? Allow her name to be attached to something that tries to pass off a conference call transcript as a one-on-one interview (or, at the very least, is intentionally misleading to that end).

Here's Kitt's file from Monday and here's Alex Ovechkin's conference call from last Thursday. An introductory paragraph here, a little editing there and, voila - original content!

To recap - these were not her questions and there's no disclosure anywhere that the Q&A was a conference call via the NHL. This is no different than if a political reporter published portions of a Presidential press conference under her byline with the headline "A quick chat with George W. Bush."

And the PHWA is worried about bloggers lowering journalistic standards?

H/t Nate in the comments to this morning's post

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow, great catch JP. That's outrageous and inexcusable.

FAUX RUMORS said...

1) Isn't the term "journalistic standards" an oxymoron these days?
2) Agreed that many bloggers have more "standards' than quite a few "professional journalists". The past presidential campaign certainly was a clear illustration that the profession is as good as dead!

Anonymous said...

Unbelievable. Definitely try to give this story as big of an airing as possible.

GrayCalx said...

faux rumors is absolutely correct. Whether you're liberal, conservative, libertarian or [shudder] a Penquins fan you have to admit that journalism as a ethical professional is dead. There is only bias, agendas and paychecks.

No offense Japer if you consider yourself a journalist. I like my Caps news biased... so spin away! ;)

JP said...

Me? A journalist? Never.

Ever.

F'real.

Hooks Orpik said...

"faux rumors is absolutely correct. Whether you're liberal, conservative, libertarian or [shudder] a Penquins fan you have to admit that journalism as a ethical professional is dead."

Agreed! (in most cases)

Dirk Hoag said...

The line between MSM and bloggers is pretty blurry, though. Back in the day, Kitt used to be part of the crew over at In the Crease, a "by the fan, for the fan" hockey site, back before we had the word blog to describe such a thing.

That is an awful gaffe, though. How could she not think this would get detected?

Brian said...

William “Boots” Del Biaggio, Rick Tocchet, Ryan Hollweg and Chris Pronger, Ted Saskin.

Like a Reese's, journalism and the NHL just go together.

Sam Porter said...

EPIC FAIL

WFY said...

The editor is also to blame, since they write the headlines.

Mogen David said...

Did any check through the rest of her stuff. None of the interviews are hers and most of the articles are lifted from NHL.com or press release. Just pick a sentence and google. You'll pull up the AP or the NHL.com article. At least through the Iginla interview. I didn't catch any attributions.

JP said...

I did notice that, Star of David.

I also noticed that, as a buddy said, when you compare that examiner photo to the one here (and no, that's not her on the left), apparently she doesn’t mind bending the truth a little bit.

Jack Hazard said...

I'm okay in knowing that I'll never have the "journalistic standards" or Kornhole, Cox, or Wilbitch.

Still though, that's pretty shameless in any arena but the sixth grade.

Nick in New York said...

brutal. Just brutal.

BReynolds said...

Well done JP. "Reporters" like her make me seriously wonder why they don't credential the bloggers who actually report.

Anonymous said...

Actually, credentialed members of the NHL media are invited to participate in the calls, and questions are on a first come first serve basis, and so whetehr or not we get to ask a question, I am on the call. The NHL then releases the transcript from the call to all credentialed media.