King Kaufman's Sports Daily
When sports niches clash: Radio host Colin Cowherd's use of a blog's material highlighted a cultural gap. Plus: Women's Tournament.
Read more: Sports, Radio, Journalism, Football, Michigan, College Football, King Kaufman, Sports Daily
March 28, 2006 | Two sports-fan subcultures collided last week, and it wasn't pretty, though it all ended up well enough.
ESPN Radio host Colin Cowherd used some material off a Michigan football fan blog, presenting joke questions from a Wonderlic test on his show Wednesday without attribution, as though it were original material. When e-mails started flooding in objecting to the theft, Cowherd fired off a series of rude, taunting responses calling those with complaints whiners.
Almost certainly at the urging of his bosses at ESPN, Cowherd offered a sincere-sounding apology on the air Monday, five days after the incident.
Oddly, this case of radio plagiarism happened the same week conservative Washington Post blogger Ben Domenech's print and online plagiarism created a firestorm in political and media circles. Yet beyond the blogs, the Cowherd affair created nary a ripple.
A letter about the incident headlined "What about radio journalism?" was posted on Jim Romenesko's blog at Poynter.org and gained no traction with the media pros who haunt that site.
The creators of the M Zone, the aggrieved football site, had declared themselves "pissed" last week at Cowherd's not giving them credit for their work, which was a satire on news reports about Texas quarterback Vince Young having done poorly on a Wonderlic test at the NFL Scouting combine.
The M Zone authors accepted Cowherd's apology Monday, writing, "It's over."
"We felt powerless," wrote Yost, one of the M Zone's founders, in an e-mail to me. "An almost-6-month-old blog against 'the Worldwide Leader in Sports.' But we were mad."
So Yost and his M Zone partner, Benny, who both wish to remain anonymous because they don't want co-workers to wonder if they spend more time on their blog than they do on their real jobs, asked readers to write to Cowherd and, at the suggestion of a reader, to ESPN ombudsman George Solomon.
A procedural note: I've made some minor trims to Yost's e-mail comments.
"We had no idea the response would be so overwhelmingly positive and the sheer numbers would be so staggering," Yost writes. "It really seemed to have struck a nerve, not only among the online sports community, but bloggers in general."