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Monday, October 11, 1999
SPORTS SITE NIXES MEMORABILIA POLICY
Sportcut.com Wanted Writers To Collect Items
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by Kevin Featherly
A new national sports Web site found itself in ethical hot water before it even launched. Sportcut.com asked free-lance writers to collect sports memorabilia while on the beat. Collected items would be auctioned off online, with the writer and Web site splitting the revenue 50-50.
Surprisingly, only one person complained. But once word of the policy got out, the site quickly rescinded its policy.
Hank Nuwer, an author, sociologist and sports writer who has written about everything from the running great Jesse Owens to high school hazing, told Sportcut.com News Producer Tara Hein-Philips he saw a potential conflict of interest should journalists engage in soliciting memorabilia for profit.
He got a letter back, which he found hardly satisfactory. "They wrote back and said, 'Some think it is (a conflict of interest) and some think it's not,'" Nuwer said, adding that the letter indicated other writers had already agreed to solicit memorabilia. "I wrote back and said I could not go ahead at all, and that I couldn't work for them, period."
Nuwer then e-mailed his disdain to a friend, ethics instructor Steve Nash at the University of Richmond, Va. From there, the note eventually wound up on the desk of The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, which on Sept. 22 publicized the prospective policy, along with Nuwer's sharp criticism of it. Shortly afterward, Sportcut.com informed its writers that it would no longer consider using them to solicit memorabilia.
"We realized it was a mistake on our part," Hein-Philips said. "We basically felt that the policy hadn't really been thought through, and we hadn't really considered how people might take it. So we corrected it. When the objections were raised, we thought the policy through."
The site, which was to have made its debut Oct. 1 but is delayed in its launch, will not solicit memorabilia from writers when it goes live. It will only solicit the material through "professional collectors" and auction those items through its auction site, Hein-Philips said.
While Sportcut.com changed its policy, Nuwer worries about how new Web sites might influence young journalists. Increasingly, these sites emerge as a training ground for budding writers, journalists that may not have firm grounding in the ethical issues that plague reporters.
Suppose a site like Sportcut.com actually were to gather sports memorabilia by exploiting reporters' close contacts with sources, or some other equally slippery practice? How would a young reporter come to understand the ethical conflicts, if even the bosses are unconcerned? If such behavior became widespread, what would prevent sports journalism from sliding back into an era like the 1920s, when writers were often little more than flacks for the teams they covered?
"If this was 1978, I probably would have gone along with it," Nuwer said, noting that as it happened, he was the only writer who complained about what Sportcut.com was pitching. "I'd be thinking, this is a legal contract, doesn't this look like it's the right thing to do? But if there's one thing older people can do is to kind of stand up when you have a chance to do so. Maybe now those writers who were going to go along with it will now say, 'Whoa, I didn't think of that.'"
Kevin Featherly (kfeatherly@uswest.net) is a new media writer in the Twin Cities of Minnesota.