Why Deadspin Had to Publish the ESPN Horndog Glossier

Deadspin, like all of Gawker Media blogs, is at its best when it is serving more as a media watchdog than as a source of serious journalistic reporting.

Deadspin was founded as a blog without "access, favor, or discretion," and the source of its creation, as noted by Will Leitch in God Save The Fan , is that the media that reports on sports have gotten in bed with the sports teams they cover. It had the financial and media resources to do so better than anything else, and its purpose was ultimately to improve the experience for sports fans who have long been frustrated with prima donna athletes, shock jock radio hosts, idiotic beat writers, and most of all, ESPN, which dominated all television sports coverage.

Over the course of Leitch's editorship, that purpose got lost in the frenzy, and the issue became less about fans vs. sports professionals and more about bloggers vs. mainstream media. Every time the term "mother's basement" was evoked, bloggers everywhere rallied up equally harsh defenses. This side of the debate reached its peak in the Buzz Bissinger-Will Leitch interview in 2008.

From the fallout of that debate, however, there was something of a need to chill out, reach a middle ground, and find where bloggers and mainstream media reporters met. Bissinger had Deadspin make amends, and in the collapse of the newspaper industry in the past year, few people were willing to argue that blogs still were not a vehicle for "serious journalism."

The one problem was that "serious journalism" was never Deadspin's job. Deadspin was created to expose corruption within the entire sports industry, how it conflates the coverage of sports, how far removed it is from the sports fan experience, and how it ultimately hurts sports fans. With access, favor, and discretion, there wouldn't be a Deadspin.

A.J. Daulerio, one of the more beloved role players on Deadspin before he became its editor, had spent the better part of the year trying to prove that Deadspin could be just as viable a source of reporting as any other news outlet (much in the vein of Nick Denton's 2007 request for Gawker Media's flagship blog).

However, whether it was the Manny Ramirez investigation, the Josh Hamilton photo shoot, or, the Steve Phillips scandal, A.J. ran into the constant issues of being scooped, dealing with unreliable sources, and often having stories blown by random factors. All the while, he was still the "blog" guy, getting contentious emails from people who found the "minor" Deadspin stories of sports people humiliating themselves to be offensive.

Thus, Daulerio this week turned Deadspin back to its roots, a move I had been hoping the site would do for some time.

Rather than try to make it as a serious journalist (which would lead to the conflation of access and favor), Daulerio unleashed the bevy of scoops he had received about how the people who are supposed to be covering athletes are engaging in the exact same dubious practices that they claim to criticize athletes for engaging in.

If ESPN is an old boy's club where the male reporters behave horrifically around gullible females who recognize them from TV, and where female employees have to sleep their way to the top, it should be exposed. There is no better place to expose that culture than Deadspin. If the emails Deadspin has received have proven to be inaccurate, we will know in the future, but A.J. is more likely to be in prison than fired by Denton for publishing them.

But if Deadspin was truly going to be a service to fans, it had no business being discrete about these emails. Other bloggers are no doubt furious because they think (perhaps justly) that it soils the reputation of bloggers as serious journalists. But the desire to be "serious" about sports, which is enjoyed by fans for non-serious reasons, is what got sports journalists into this mess in the first place.

In fact, my only complaint about the Deadspin leaks were the fact that A.J. decided to release them the day before his beloved Phillies clinched the Pennant. He should be spending today in a drunken hung-over joy rather than worrying about the future of his career. So it goes.