There is, perhaps, no more fertile ground for scoops than sports journalism in the days leading up to a trade deadline such as the NBA’s, which arrived today at 3pm Eastern.

For the past week, the news outlets and Twitter feeds that cover the NBA have buzzed with stories about what would or would not happen by the deadline. The handful of reporters at the top of the breaking news ecosystem each broke several stories in the span of a few days—a career’s worth of output for good reporters in many other fields.

Most of these scoops are dug out of shifting sand. They add nothing to our understanding of professional basketball. Their shelf life is negligible; they break news that would have been announced publicly hours or days later. They are often so thinly sourced as to give readers no way to evaluate their credibility. And they don’t follow the standards established by mainstream news outlets for transparency on when and why anonymous sources are used.

One example: A week before the NBA trade deadline, Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo Sports reported that the Houston Rockets were shopping their star center, Dwight Howard. Howard was not traded before the deadline. If he had been, that story would have done nothing for its readers beyond giving them advance notice of something they would have found out later. With no trade, the reader is left with no way to know whether the story was wrong, or it was right, and the trade negotiations it described never came to fruition.

Continue reading Anonymous sourcing and the problem with NBA trade ‘scoops’