What does it mean exactly when an individual with media credentials, and practice facility, media row, and locker room access, reports on the Blazers? More importantly, what is expected when a person smacks "By" and their name on something? In looking for a place to share opinions and my Blazer fan-dom with other Blazer fans, I spent the pre-season and the first 6 games or so reading and commenting on Blazer's Edge. What became increasingly apparent is that Ben Golliver wants it both ways: to be a respected journalist, and a content hack. Not a week goes by that he isn't posting the meat of other sport journalists' work, and slapping a different title on it with "By Ben Golliver." His hack job of Chris Haynes' article on Earl Waton was the last straw for me, and I responded below: By Ben Golliver Since Ben didn’t add anything to the story, and takes great liberty adding “By Ben Golliver” to someone else’s work, I thought it appropriate to add something that was actually “By Ben Golliver” in regards to Earl Watson: “I’m not gonna acknowledge he’s on the team. I don’t even want to watch that guy play. I think Earl Watson might even be Ronnie Price. I don’t know how much he’s gonna play which is good.” – By Ben Golliver Check out Ben’s Podcast with Kevin Pelton. If you haven’t heard it, it’s definitely worth it. ; ) To no surprise my post was deleted within the hour. The truth hurts even when it's devoid of the taboo and often mis-defined "ad homonym." If you're going to bad mouth a guy and say (in his podcast with Kevin Pelton) that "I don't even want to acknowledge he's even on the team", then don't. And don't be a hypocrite. Sure, he lets people know he didn't write it, but then he goes on to cut out the meat of the article like any of us would do on this forum, so you don't need to go to the actual story to get the gist. So, why if it's ok for me, would it not be for Benjamin? Because I'm no journalist. I don't do post game write-ups for money, and push traffic to a web site to that end, and I sure as heck don't have locker room access, or any access for that matter, to provide me a wealth of information to write about. I find it hypocritical in both respects, that he hocks other people's work off as his own, and that he bad mouths the very players he benefits from writing about. Also not surprising - even when he is supposedly writing something original, like talking about the Blazers using ipads during time outs in one of his game recaps, it's not: “Joe Freeman@BlazerFreeman Nothing worse than researching story for weeks, waiting for photos/right time to write about it only to have someone drop it in game recap.” Golliver was no less (with an audible goofy laugh) slighting Joel Freeland after the pre-season, as he continues to do so with Nolan Smith. How this guy even has access of any kind is a mystery. A Bill Simmons wannabe with no credibility, unless an audience equals credibility. If the Blazer players actually read or heard what he says about them, none of them would speak to him. And Dave... bless his heart. His prose is quite articulate, despite the over-use of words like: torrid, yeoman, and carom. (They're called bricks Dave, not caroms.) But I've mentioned this before in another thread, that he's not a basketball guy, he's just a fan. And that's great. And I like Dave as a person. But he writes about basketball with no legit basketball background or with any knowledge of playing on a competitive team, which isn't intended as a slight, but rather an explanation for why he's so off base and so heavily reliant on what other actual stat/basketball minds say about the Blazers. Paraphrasing here, "One of the reason I project Portland to be a 38-42 win team is because they had issues with turnovers in pre-season that indicates that will continue, and that they led the league in rebounding during the same time doesn't mean anything." - Dave The bottom line is you can't call those guys out on anything or they delete your post, which is the sign of an extremely ignorant and insecure environment that I want no part of. About that rebounding... Well, of course, I'm dying to hop on Mals post about rebounding, and it's too bad I didn't know about this forum sooner or I would have been right there with him. Call it a rap. - rook
you must not read his stuff at SI. His more journalistic work is over there while his blogger work more appears at Blazersedge. http://nba.si.com/
I've began to accept the content for what it is. The moment they started hiding fan posts/shots for these pieces by Ben/Dave, that site went to shit. The nazi mods just exacerbate the problem. They've got some great posters who need to come over here.
So you separate the blogger from the journalist, as if ripping off other peoples work and pawning it off as your own, while talking out of both sides of your mouth is cool either way. I would respectfully disagree.
The mods don't know the difference between a dissenting opinion or fact and an ad homonym fallacy/attack. If you quote them word for word, to show an inconsistency if not a complete 180, your comment is deleted. So, I guess my point was more of a PSA, but I suppose y'all here probably already know all this and why y'all are here.
but he doesn't do that. I don't think anyone there credits him for writing those articles and I've never seen him take credit for those articles as himself. he always links to the articles from the other journalists in those posts. It works for the site because otherwise the only place to comment on those articles would be in the fanshots where even before the site redesign they barely got comments or hits. When Ben does those posts they often get 100+ comments and i would be willing to bet that many commenters there follow through and read the full article, not just the excerpts he pastes. I would be interested in knowing what the hit count difference is on say a chris haynes article when it is posted on BE and when it is not and see if the average hit count for his article is higher or lower.
B.F.: You are quite the prolific writer. And good at it. Glad you made it out of whatever dark abyss you used to post at. Welcome.
Thank you. I was on iamatrailblazerfan and ESPN for years. The quality and number of posters were lacking on ESPN. And the numbers of posters on iamatrailblazerfan trailed off significanltly leading to poor content and group think (that the lack of any objection was grounds for validation). Dave on BE is a good writer, but sadly, I think what he's really saying gets lost in his words and overlooked. If you took out all the prose and broke it down to "The Blazers defense is terrible, they can't rebound, they are a turnover machine, they won't make the playoffs, the bench still isn't good enough, Robin Lopez isn't the answer, Freeland should have been traded, Asik is the man....", it's easier to understand that his basketball knowledge is 100% fan and 0% basketball experience frame of reference. I just hope I can get my point across without boring anyone or drowning my point with paragraphs. There's lots of smart people and passionate fans here with strong opinions that aren't censored, and that makes it fun.
I haven't gone to that site in quite a while. I was reading comments and made some interesting contrary points and when I refreshed 20 minutes later the comment was gone. I haven't been back since.
He takes someone else's work, and puts the meat of it on HIS blog. He gets paid for it, it's not out of the goodness of his heart. There is a difference between what he does, and what any of us do when we post someone's article. It boils down to a fundamental misunderstanding between fan versus paid journalist. Can you imagine if The Oregonian or any other national writer posted the meat of other journalists work on THEIR web site with the intent to increase traffic for ad dollars? If it was such a favor for him to drive traffic to csnnw, why doesn't csnnw and The Oregonian posting the meat of Ben's articles on their web sites? He's a credential journalist with not an original story, let alone thought, to his name. It's as sad as his continued jokes about Nolan Smith with his goofy laugh playing on a loop in the background like a bad sit-com.
