Somebody is going to break the LeBron James story.
We don’t know who. We don’t know when. But sometime in the coming days or weeks, some entrepreneurial journalist is going to scoop everyone else and land the biggest sports story of the year, and maybe the decade.
Odds are it will be someone like Chris Broussard of ESPN The Magazine, Chris Sheridan, Ric Bucher or Marc Stein of ESPN.com, Adrian Wojnarowski of Yahoo! Sports or Brian Windhorst of The Cleveland Plain-Dealer.
My old Columbia University classmate Richard Deitsch of SI.com put out these odds on Twitter:
Chris Broussard 2-1
Brian Windhorst 3-1
Adrian Wojnarowski and Marc Spears 4-1
Ric Bucher or Marc Stein 5-1
Howard Beck/Jonathan Abrams 8-1
Ian Thomsen 9-1
Stephen A. Smith 14-1
Deadspin: 17-1
Field 20-1
Richard Deitsch 250-1
Maybe it will be somebody right here in New York City like my colleagues Alan Hahn of Newsday, Frank Isola of the Daily News, Howard Beck of The New York Times or Marc Berman of the New York Post.
Two things are for sure, though.
First, whoever breaks it will have landed the hugest story of the year and should be able to translate that into respect/props/money/perks from their bosses and fellow journalists.
Second, it won’t be “breaking news” for long.
In the old days of newspapers, you’d break a story and your competitors would have to wait a day to catch up. People interested in the news would have to buy your newspaper to get the story.
Then came the Internet and it became a race to see who could get the news posted quickest online. That led to blogs like this one, where journalists could post information directly to the Web, without having to deal with those tiresome and tired editors…whom most self-respecting journalists dislike.
Now comes the age of Twitter/Facebook/TMZ, where something is literally breaking news for a couple of minutes before everyone else picks it up, adds to it, subtracts from it…or waits for it to be “verified” or “confirmed” by The Worldwide Leader.
“Obviously, I’d love to break the story,” Broussard told ESPN. “Everybody would love to break the story, but we’ll see what happens.”
(Photo courtesy AP)
Follow Adam Zagoria on Twitter
