SMY chat -- Brady problems, Spikes shines

[MassPats38]

Not to long ago everyone here was singing SMY's praises as being Reiss-like, well-informed and level-headed. I think this column of hers is yarbles and it makes me think that she is angling for a radio or t.v. gig where she can spew this half-baked tripe and become the female Felger.

I believe some of the praise may have been based on the fact she visited and posted here (whether she does so anymore I don't know). One of Reiss's major positives is his willingness to respond to fan posts. She did respond while here (and apparently still does given her willingness to chat).

If this exchange was chat-based, I would not hold it to the standard I would a formal article. In chat sessions, opinions are given on the fly. Also, while I am a huge fan of the Pats keeping the media in the dark, by denying direct access to players you do not eliminate the fan need for stories, whether good or bad. The lack of actual facts prompts speculation as what the stories actually might be based only on the few known facts. As the saying goes, don't hate the player, hate the game. I will take this speculation over players venting on team issues in press conferences.

 

[Deus Irae]

People keep shooting the messengers. Soon they'll be no messengers left. You're already basically down to just Reiss, and even he has come under fire from the most 'pure'.

 

[Leave No Doubt]

Reiss set the standard here, largely by doggedly persuing the facts, and while I disagree with his opinion in a number of instances I respect that it is well thought out and informed.

This. I really trusted his information and I liked his lack of bs filler; this approach is what used to get him some good interviews. I always had the impression the Pats trusted him too. There were a lot of Mike Reiss Appreciation threads here, the same can't be said about anyone else unfortunately.

 

[MoLewisrocks]

I follow most of the scribes on Twitter. Truly the best venue for breaking news. Anyway, out of all the local scribes, SMY is the worst. A dollar short and a day late - all the time. Seems to be WAY out of the loop and I wonder if she has any contacts at all besides her scribe friends.

She actually had developed an actual locker room insider source last season, but as a result of breaking (not to mention falling for) his version of the story she effectively lost not only him but likely any shot at developing anything beyond disgruntled sources going forward. Kinda inched herself into Borges/Cafardo territory in one felled swoop. Having sources is no panacea in and of itself since they can be be both agenda driven and fleeting... Good reporters learn to take everything they hear with a grain of salt lest they find that the price for breaking one a sided or unverifiable story may exceed it's short term attention value. Just ask Tomase. They also often find that maintaining their own counsel and not jumping aboard the bandwagon du jour often results in an increased ability to land actual informed sourcing and stories that flow therefrom... Players and management are both inclined to utilize media they feel they can trust to at least be fair and balanced.

Reiss is again a good example. He hears things from players, coaches, peers and has to weigh the value of just regurgitating every whispered word he hears (which they used to call background given to responsonsible reporters for context) even putting too much stock in off hand commentary (like the 2008 Cassel vs. Gutierrez pre season assessment debaucle based on someone in the FO mentioning they really loved Guts work ethic...and reading into that that Cassel had one foot out the door..). But few in today's sports media are willing to be patient or thoughtful at the expense of losing out on a radio gig or being maligned by your peers as an organization rumpswab (the mediot equivalent of being labeled a homer here...).

Holley would be another good example, including of a guy who learned his lesson (after listening to his peers assessment of a dour new HC) and was man enough to apologize and convince that same HC he could be trusted as a journalist to be given unprecedented access to this team and even his peers would remain unaware he was penning a future best seller until it was released.

Felger would be a poor example were we not these days measuring success in multimedia $$$. He's the insecure guy whose developing sense of desperation to get ahead in a multi media setting ultimately resulted in his having virtually no sources because he became a hypercritical blabbermouth. But for him landing the radio gigs has been a worthwhile short term tradeoff. Eventually if his act wears thin and his ratings don't compete, he'll be hard pressed to land another good old boy network fill in job as a blogger. He doesn't think critically enough or write well enough to be taken seriously as a columnist or commentator and he's no longer capable of hustling hard enough or perceived as balanced enough to earn a living as an accessed beat reporter.

Life is all about choices. You can get ahead by simply being good, or if not or if you're simply impatient you can rely on the fraternity that is the good old boy network that exists in the Boston media to circle the wagons and cushion any potential downfalls. For a while anyway.

 

[Kontradiction]

People keep shooting the messengers. Soon they'll be no messengers left. You're already basically down to just Reiss, and even he has come under fire from the most 'pure'.

I'm not usually one to do that. And actually, I really don't mind SMY's articles at all. She's a good writer. But, to me, it's pretty obvious why the chat was set up when it comes to this particular topic. The Globe, obviously, is reaping the benefits and for now, I'll bet her editor is happy.

 

[fgssand]

I'm not usually one to do that. And actually, I really don't mind SMY's articles at all. She's a good writer. But, to me, it's pretty obvious why the chat was set up when it comes to this particular topic. The Globe, obviously, is reaping the benefits and for now, I'll bet her editor is happy.

It wasn't always this way. Once upon a time, the writer - beat writer or jounalist was RESPECTED as they were the conduit for news from team to public. The writers used to respect the team they followed and the readership they used to serve.

I used to watch, read and enjoy all the writers, I appreciated their opinions (pro & con), watched their shows -- all of it. Today, there are very few that I trust and even the ones that I do - I take with a grain of salt. Exception, Mike Reiss, he is often singled out as the all the time top dog of Patriot writer and he IS #1. He is a throwback, he knows how to write, inform, verify, stay neutral with team players, coaches, owners, other writers and fans. Plenty of room for more like him. Chris Price is another that can be trusted. Why can't the others follow these guys and not the aholes like borges, tomase etc. Breer is one that maybe can be saved, he is very knowlegable - but needs to avoid the hollywood pitfalls that he has fallen victim to of late and stay with football.

Somewhere along the way - to me it started with in the late 90's early 2000's - probably when internet was coming on and the writers became radio & TV personalities in and of themselves. They found that if they teased us and pissed us off, their rating would go up - so they did just that. They through decency, verification, honesty to the wind in a shameless quest for ratings.

Sadly, SMY seems to be taking the same road. She WAS, during her Projo days a hard worker that did not have that smug, holier than though felger/shaugnessey/borges attitude. Too bad she went to the globe. she'll never recover, they got to her.

 

[Synovia]

Somewhere along the way - to me it started with in the late 90's early 2000's - probably when internet was coming on and the writers became radio & TV personalities in and of themselves. They found that if they teased us and pissed us off, their rating would go up - so they did just that. They through decency, verification, honesty to the wind in a shameless quest for ratings.

In the 90s? The news has been about propaganda for 300 years now.

 

[chris_in_sunnyvale]

Can we get more info on Spikes? It got half the headline, yet zero posts as followup.

Regards,
Chris

 

[Kontradiction]

It wasn't always this way. Once upon a time, the writer - beat writer or jounalist was RESPECTED as they were the conduit for news from team to public. The writers used to respect the team they followed and the readership they used to serve.

I used to watch, read and enjoy all the writers, I appreciated their opinions (pro & con), watched their shows -- all of it. Today, there are very few that I trust and even the ones that I do - I take with a grain of salt. Exception, Mike Reiss, he is often singled out as the all the time top dog of Patriot writer and he IS #1. He is a throwback, he knows how to write, inform, verify, stay neutral with team players, coaches, owners, other writers and fans. Plenty of room for more like him. Chris Price is another that can be trusted. Why can't the others follow these guys and not the aholes like borges, tomase etc. Breer is one that maybe can be saved, he is very knowlegable - but needs to avoid the hollywood pitfalls that he has fallen victim to of late and stay with football.

Somewhere along the way - to me it started with in the late 90's early 2000's - probably when internet was coming on and the writers became radio & TV personalities in and of themselves. They found that if they teased us and pissed us off, their rating would go up - so they did just that. They through decency, verification, honesty to the wind in a shameless quest for ratings.

Sadly, SMY seems to be taking the same road. She WAS, during her Projo days a hard worker that did not have that smug, holier than though felger/shaugnessey/borges attitude. Too bad she went to the globe. she'll never recover, they got to her.

There's noting wrong with SMY. She's done a pretty good amount of positive reporting on this team. This topic and the conjecture going along with it seem more like an editor cracking down on his team to get some hits more than it does a reporter with an axe to grind.

 

[MoLewisrocks]

There's noting wrong with SMY. She's done a pretty good amount of positive reporting on this team. This topic and the conjecture going along with it seem more like an editor cracking down on his team to get some hits more than it does a reporter with an axe to grind.

You think editors dictate to reporters what opinions they best express?? Do you think they encourage their employees to miss report facts, too?? I know there are some tabloid so called news outlets who skew opinion primarily by hiring columnists who toe the company line or encourage contrarianism amongst their columnists in order to fuel viewership, but we're talking about reporting here.

 

[Kontradiction]

You think editors dictate to reporters what opinions they best express?? Do you think they encourage their employees to miss report facts, too?? I know there are some tabloid so called news outlets who skew opinion primarily by hiring columnists who toe the company line or encourage contrarianism amongst their columnists in order to fuel viewership, but we're talking about reporting here.

This isn't really a view, Mo. It's a guess. Maybe you can call it an educated guess when looking at who her sources are (if any) in this, but it's still a guess. I detailed that in my first post. And yes, I'm sure her editor did green light it with website hits in mind. As I said before, it's the dead part of the offseason and this is a hot button topic. She admitted right off the bat that both sides (the team and Brady) have been quiet and then proceeded to talk about it anyway.

 

[MoLewisrocks]

This isn't really a view, Mo. It's a guess. Maybe you can call it an educated guess when looking at who her sources are (if any) in this, but it's still a guess. I detailed that in my first post. And yes, I'm sure her editor did green light it with website hits in mind. As I said before, it's the dead part of the offseason and this is a hot button topic. She admitted right off the bat that both sides (the team and Brady) have been quiet and then proceeded to talk about it anyway.

I'm not even talking about fanning the flames by opining that she can see a deal not getting done and Brady departing. Like I said before, opinions are like *******s and even reporters sport those. I'm more concerned with her informing her audience that Brady lost money on his 2007 restructure and as a result his salary precludes a contract being constructed under the 30% rule because Kraft would have to cough up a bundle of cash he could no longer amortize to boot. I know the cap is confusing, but it's not nuclear physics and she volunteered information to underscore her position that was absolute poppy****... It's no wonder AD bamboozled her.

 

[Deus Irae]

I'm not even talking about fanning the flames by opining that she can see a deal not getting done and Brady departing. Like I said before, opinions are like *******s and even reporters sport those. I'm more concerned with her informing her audience that Brady lost money on his 2007 restructure and as a result his salary precludes a contract being constructed under the 30% rule because Kraft would have to cough up a bundle of cash he could no longer amortize to boot. I know the cap is confusing, but it's not nuclear physics and she volunteered information to underscore her position that was absolute poppy****... It's no wonder AD bamboozled her.

Wait..... Are you trying to say that the 30% rule doesn't impact how contracts are able to be done right now?

 

[MoLewisrocks]

Wait..... Are you trying to say that the 30% rule doesn't impact how contracts are able to be done right now?

No, not at all. What I've been saying since the thread started is that Shalize totally misrepresented the situation/impact in general as well as how it relates to Brady's deal. His 2009 salary (on which the calculation is based) was INCREASED as a result of that 2007 restructure during which she intimates he was screwed over even though his bank account and restructure terms clearly say otherwise since he netted a couple of million more in the process, and 2007 salary is immaterial to the calculation. Also roster bonus counts as salary as does a pro rated portion of signing bonus.... In other words Brady's 2009 salary "basis" is a lot closer to Mannings than the difference in their pure "salary" in that season would indicate. She also stated that Kraft would be forced to come up with a prohibitive lump sum amount of bonus money AS A RESULT that could not be split or amortized for some reason...which is totally hogwash. And she used those "facts" to underscore her rationale for opining that Brady would not be finishing his career here...

Brady's contract precludes doing as front loaded a 2010 deal as Manning's camp could (probably by several million or so), but this team hasn't shown all that much inclination to heavily frontload any of the deals they've done under the same circumstances. One reason likely being players have short term memory disorder when it comes to frontloading...not to mention intentional backloading... And over the term of the deal it's highly likely conservatively speaking that Manning will again be under contract for several million more than Brady.., Because that will only amount to roughly a million per...

There have been sufficient threads on the topic on this board she belongs to, let alone other sites, organizations and individuals - including even some of her peers who have made the effort to get it right - to make what she cavalierly reported in that Q & A session inexcusible. If I wanted to nit pick, in the question following her misrepresentation of the 30% rule she talks about how if Mankins reports in week 10 he will collect 6/16ths of his $1.54M reduced tender. That'd be 6/17ths since we all know the league pays out contract over 17 weeks in season...or we should by now.

 

[PatsFanInVa]

This isn't really a view, Mo. It's a guess. Maybe you can call it an educated guess when looking at who her sources are (if any) in this, but it's still a guess. I detailed that in my first post. And yes, I'm sure her editor did green light it with website hits in mind. As I said before, it's the dead part of the offseason and this is a hot button topic. She admitted right off the bat that both sides (the team and Brady) have been quiet and then proceeded to talk about it anyway.

Okay a few things -

Since I'm down here in VA, I don't read the Globe regularly, and only know ProJo exists basically because of SMY's Asante Samuel reporting. I'm also not a cap expert, though early on here I tried to learn as much as I could about how it worked. I found it fascinating to go from ignorant fanboy who believed whatever was reported to knowing more than most reporters.... and still be an ignorant fanboy in comparison here.

Howsomever, sports guys generally cover "who threw da ball real good, who runned real good, who catched real good, who hit who so hard they had to stop play," and the like. Then they add on random bits of knowledge of the game as they go.

From the Asante era, I remember a few things about this particular writer -

1 - pretty knowledgeable, and pretty open to learning what she didn't know

2 - obviously open to interaction w/the fan base... probably went to a conference or two where beat writers were told to use social media, and realized familiarity w/those media were an easy built-in advantage over the older beat writers. Still, it's pretty ballsy to accept that trend, get on the bleeding edge, and deal w/whatever the fans sling at you. And really, would you rather have a reporter w/the guts to do it, or one that can't cope? If nothing else, this is the place for cap discussions on the Pats, particularly when you factor in the Miguel stuff (again I've been out of it for a while but I assume he's maintaining the motherlode of cap info)

3 - Just as we fans see bias in the media, they see the much more obvious bias among fans. It is almost a given that the media will seem to be "stirring the pot." and of course, they are rewarded when pots are stirred.

4 - you might have her dead to rights, Mo, I don't know. That would just mean that in a chat format, she didn't get the complexities of the structure of a contract right. She might be using a B+ knowledge of those facts to support a conclusion that her observations suggest to her, or a conclusion just for the sake of buzz. Okay, that's going easy on her really. If you've got more knowledge than her, that's a bad thing, since she is a sports reporter... at least in the abstract. It seems to me most of them do way worse. On the other side, we as fans - as a class - do way worse in terms of objectivity... sports reporting centers on the home team, pro or con. If they bring up a con, we want to know why they'd ever say such a thing and we lambaste them mercilessly. If they bring up a pro, we cross our fingers and call them insightful.

5 - She seems to be closer to players than teams, as has been mentioned here. That yields good things and bad things. In the Asante saga, she got the tattoo right, a reference to a song that had a layer of slang built in ("get rich to this,") while the rest of the media was portraying it as "get rich or die trying" or somesuch, and was routinely calling it an unambiguous statement of greed. Now, the explanation might have been bullcrap, but the facts were out there for anybody to pursue... as far as I know she was the one that "broke" this bit of the story.

Is it just me, or does it seem that the ability to get those player interviews and to report those player viewpoints seems to be her forte, if not her stock in trade?

We're a fan board. We tend to like management's viewpoint, because it represents "the team." That might be a Patsfans thing... we didn't think Drew Bledsoe was our personal friend, we didn't think Ty Law was irreplaceable, or Lawyer Milloy, or any of the various receivers who have come and gone. A lot of us have decades w/this one team, and the charge of "bandwagon jumping" is leveled at the slightest provocation.

We might feel differently on Brady, but if he walks like Montana did to play in KC, I think we'll wish him well except when he plays against us... and most of us would go back to being Pats fans, sans Brady, and with a good deal less optimism every season.

So on Patsfans I think we're by and large fans of the team, and have seen personnel come and go... But out there in the general readership there's lots more of being fans of this or that player.

Getting player POVs out there is probably a big part of her job description.

One broad outlines thought: Brady's up for his next deal. It's been widely reported and widely agreed upon that Brady pushed back money to the last year of his last deal when we got Moss. Brady's next deal is not yet done, so they have not yet agreed on what is fair.

While SMY tried to go deep into the mechanics, and by Mo's light, got it all wrong, is it possible that she's got the broad outlines of any disagreement right, but the mechanics wrong?

I am asking, not telling. It seems that there's a claim of superior contract knowledge here, which I just am not in a position to evaluate.

What SMY has is superior access to the players. Is it possible that they put their camp's viewpoint out there in so many words, and she filled in the blanks wrong?

I know that this very post will send some of you guys scurrying for the "the very fact that you asked the question proves you don't know your ass from your elbow" response, and that's fine... I'll sit back and watch.

Fgssand's got the deterioration of media in general right, by the way. Recently saw a plenary session on the direction of media by a guy who teaches journalism... he did a pretty comprehensive presentation regarding what people are going into journalism for. Evidently there are no more aspiring Woodwards, Bernsteins, Cronkites, or Murrows. Instead, everybody wants to be on TEEVEEE. Meaning, they want to be the talking head, not a real journalist.

I'll leave it to you guys to decide whether that's SMY's case... to me, she's far from the purest example of this phenomenon you'll find (but I can buy the "get me some hits, new-media lady" explanation.... and btw, you can bet her editor is not as skilled in capology as she is, whatever her relative level s in that regard.)

 

[Miguel]

I have emailed Shalise about this. She responded that she was told that signing bonuses were not being prorated this year. I do not know who gave her the incorrect information.

I then provided her with proof that they were.

 

[townes]

Count me among those who believe the media is simply making crap about about Brady and his deal. It may well be that Brady is no longer as enamored with the Patriots as he was once was, and is going to play hardball this time, if so, good for him, he's been the best player in football over his career and deserves to be paid as such. However, even if that's the case the Patriots need to pay up, and not begrudgingly but with pleasure, Brady deserves the respect and the $$ and imo it would send a great message to the team about paying those who deserve it without a fight. They should give him a deal that bring him to his late 30's so he can retire a Patriot, and they shouldn't play games and try to backload it.


Many teams in football find ways to massage their caps and pay those they value most what they deserve, and the Patriots should do the same in this instance, if that means waiting until the new labor deal is done so be it, but they need to make it clear to Brady that the 2 are separate and that he will get a great deal once the future is determined.

 

[fgssand]

I have emailed Shalise about this. She responded that she was told that signing bonuses were not being prorated this year. I do not know who gave her the incorrect information.

I then provided her with proof that they were.

A good reporter would correct themselves at this point...............

 

[Mike the Brit]

I have emailed Shalise about this. She responded that she was told that signing bonuses were not being prorated this year. I do not know who gave her the incorrect information.

I then provided her with proof that they were.

OK, folks, we've heard from the Vatican. Next question?

 

[Leave No Doubt]

A good reporter would correct themselves at this point...............

And also take a long hard look at their so-called sources. Somewhere in this thread shooting the messengers til they're all gone was mentioned; I'd rather have one or 2 trusted, solid reporters than a gazillion of them whose goal is to grab clicks and ticks. I'm not saying SMY is necessarily one of these but I'd much prefer quality over quantity.

Posters on this board do far more research to back up their fries than do most of our media; my guess is that's because people here will call eachother out in a nano-second if you post garbage. Our media could use more of that, and good on Miguel for passing on correct info.

I don't want our media to disappear, I'd just like to see them step it up a bit.