When a member of the media returns to the playing or coaching world, it’s often their media outlet that breaks the news. That didn’t happen in the latest Tim Tebow saga, though, with Fox’s Jay Glazer beating ESPN’s Adam Schefter to the punch by a whole four minutes or so. ESPN investigative reporter John Barr didn’t seem thrilled with this development, musing about it on Twitter Sunday night:

This led to Barr taking some flak, and trying to defend his position:

He then added “Merely saying there’s a way to behave when you leave a job.”

Chris Chase looked into this a bit for For The Win, and received an interesting statement from ESPN PR’s Josh Krulewitz:

“In these type of situations, our folks keep business and news separate, like church and state. Before, Tim Tebow (or his camp) had officially announced the news, it’s obviously up to reporters to gather information on their own, and as we noted on air, Jay Glazer reported it and Adam Schefter had it minutes later. In Adam’s case, it would have come through his own newsgathering/sources only and not through a company business relationship, which operates separately and independently from our news team.”

There are a few interrelated issues at play here, and one is that athletes or coaches who turn into broadcasters and then return to the sport both work for organizations that cover sports news and are potential subjects of sports news themselves. That sports news, and being first to it, does have some value. It’s why networks employ newsbreakers like Glazer and Schefter, and it’s why the discussion of ESPN’s sourcing policies matters. ESPN wants to be first to every story it can, as it should, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with Barr wanting his colleagues to get the scoop here. However, it should be noted that this is a very fine line; we’re talking about just “Tebow to sign with Eagles” and a four-minute interval, not the Watergate break-in or the Pentagon Papers.

Moreover, it’s unclear that Tebow went to Glazer here. We don’t know that he or his camp was the source of the story, which also could have arisen from the Eagles or perhaps even someone in the NFL office. Even if Tebow did release the information before the team or the league, we also don’t know that he told Glazer first and Schefter second; there’s often a gap between when reporters receive information and when they relay it, sometimes for verification purposes but sometimes just thanks to time spent composing a tweet, discussing coverage plans with editors or even just being away from their phone briefly. Thus, Barr isn’t necessarily right to blame Tebow.

Whether Tebow (or Parcells, or anyone else who goes from a network job to a sports job) should be telling their employers’ reporters first also isn’t an easily-answerable question. It would be easy to argue that they should at least tell their bosses out of common courtesy. Whether those bosses should ever pass business-side information over to the editorial side is a bit more of a debate, but Krulewitz says they didn’t here.

Hard-line ethicists might argue that the editorial side shouldn’t receive or pursue information gained by the business side at all, and that media outlets shouldn’t be covering their own employees at all, but the latter’s completely infeasible when those employees make for legitimate stories (as they often do in the sports world), and the former hard divide probably doesn’t exist in our world. Network reporters do write stories about their own network’s talent moves (see Fox’s Ken Rosenthal breaking the news that his network had hired Pete Rose), and we don’t always know how much or how little help they’re getting from the business side in doing so. Even if they do get a tip from the business side (or from the subject), that may raise some flags and potentially be imperfect, but it’s not necessarily an ethical crisis like ESPN stealing scoops from Glazer as they’ve done in the past.

In the end, this is a pretty basic story that everyone wound up with very quickly. Barr wanting ESPN to be first with that story and wanting a fellow employee to help them do so is understandable corporate pride, but this is still an odd stand to take, and probably an unnecessary one. It tries to reduce a complicated web of business and editorial interplay and issues with covering your own organization down to just “there’s a way to behave when you leave a job.” Sometimes you just have to tip your hat to the competition and credit Glazer for getting the story. It’s notable that ESPN VP John Wildhack has already said Tebow “has a home at ESPN when his playing career is done,” so it would seem that not everyone at the Worldwide Leader is all that annoyed with Tebow.

About Andrew Bucholtz

Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.

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