Sports Illustrated | The New York Times | Reuters | Outsports
In his account of the story behind Sports Illustrated's massive Jason Collins scoop, Executive Editor Jon Wertheim notes Collins has become "the first active male athlete in a major U.S. team sport to come out of the closet. Yes, that's a lot of qualifiers."



They're necessary. As Jim Buzinski told The New York Times' Sam Borden earlier this month on the occasion of No. 1 WNBA draft pick Brittney Griner's coming out: “Can you imagine if it was a man who did the exact same thing? Everyone’s head would have exploded.”

Martina Navratilova came out in 1981 when she was midway through her spectacular tennis career. Olympic soccer player Megan Rapinoe came out before the Olympics. And John Amaechi came out after his NBA career ended. (Here's Outsports' collection of coming-out stories.) (more...)

Reuters | AllThingsD | The Big Lead
Sporting News is now part of a joint venture with the British company Perform, Reuters reports. The venerable sports publication went digital-only last year and currently runs its website in partnership with AOL.

"The idea is to create a bigger U.S. presence for Perform, which already distributes sports highlights clips to some U.S. newspapers and other publications," Peter Kafka writes in AllThingsD.

Advance owns Sporting News through its American City Business Journals unit, which is contributing $4.2 million to the new joint venture, Reuters says. Perform's kicking in $1.4 million; it "will own 65 percent of the venture and has the right to buy out ACBJ's 35 percent share for $65 million until 2017," Reuters says.

Jason McIntyre reported Wednesday night that a number of Sporting News employees had been let go.

Previously: Sporting News ships its last print edition

The Washington Post | USA Today | D1scourse.com
Patrick Stevens got all 68 teams in the NCAA tournament correct while working part-time for USA Today and is the reporter University of Maryland Coach Mark Turgeon turns to for the first question at every press conference. He writes about sports on his own site, D1scourse.com. But he can't translate all that to a full-time gig, Dan Steinberg writes: Stevens was laid off twice by the Washington Times, once in 2009, again in 2012.

Since then, his work has been largely self-generated, Steinberg writes:

Although he was consumed by bubble watches and bracket modifications last week, he still went to the ACC Tournament in Greensboro, believing the visibility couldn’t hurt.

(more...)

Newspaper National Network
More male sports fans chose local print newspapers than TV, radio, or other print outlets when asked to list all the sources from which they get their "news, information and/or analysis," according a new study from the Newspaper National Network. That question doesn't include online properties, which it compares separately. The report says that among those, print newspapers' sites came out on top: "Sports Section of Newspaper Website" was the choice of 76 percent of respondents; 66 percent listed ESPN.com. (more...)

The New York Times | Sports Illustrated
The New York Times' account of how ESPN frittered away a tip about Manti Te'o's imaginary girlfriend has everything you'd want from a story-behind-the-story. It sports a marvelous headline ("As ESPN Debated, Manti Te’o Story Slipped Away"), and is a fascinating account of how Te'o's reps muscled ESPN after the story broke.

And, in a bizarre echo of the story it tells, it arrives after Sports Illustrated's account of the same events.

Both news organizations speak with ESPN News Chief Vince Doria, who tells the Times "We were very close," and tells SI "We felt we were close to reporting it." Richard Sandomir and James Andrew Miller report ESPN's tip came from Te'o's agent Tom Condon. Doria told Deitsch that ESPN's "interest in the story was Te'o, and he has now told his story." Three unnamed ESPN executives told the Times "they should have published on Jan. 16." (more...)

Sports Illustrated | Journo2Go
It was a story of two tips.

The first, as Sports Illustrated's Richard Deitsch reports, came to ESPN late on Jan. 10. The second came to Deadspin on Jan. 11. Both were similar: Something seems fishy about this Manti Te'o girlfriend story, you should check it out.

What happened after? (more...)

Of all the questions arising from Deadspin's Manti Te'o story, maybe the biggest is: Why didn't other journalists uncover the hoax sooner? The story broke Wednesday night, and news geeks are still trying to put the pieces back together.

• What did Manti Te'o know, and when did he know it? Both he and Notre Dame said he learned his dead girlfriend Lennay Kekua wasn't dead, because she never existed, on Dec. 6. And yet he referred to her on Dec. 8 and 9, Associated Press reporter Tom Coyne writes:

Te'o was in New York for the Heisman presentation on Dec. 8 and, during an interview before the ceremony that ran on the WSBT.com, the website for a South Bend TV station, Te'o said: "I mean, I don't like cancer at all. I lost both my grandparents and my girlfriend to cancer. So I've really tried to go to children's hospitals and see, you know, children."

It happened again in a Bill Dwyre column that ran in the Los Angeles Times on Dec. 10. Dwyre wrote: "He said girlfriend Lennay Kekau 'made me promise, when it happened, that I would stay and play,' Te'o said Sunday night." (more...)