Richie Whitt has his undies in a bind. I sympathize with him. But I also think he needs a better understanding of how the internet works. Let me explain.
It appears that Whitt broke the news that Cowboys Stadium will get a tattoo of the AT&T logo on the small of its back. I say “appears” because I’m taking his word for it. I haven’t combed the internet to figure out who had it first (nor will I, which I’ll explain in a second). Here is Whitt’s post. He put it up, according to the time stamp, at 8:30 a.m. yesterday. Our Jason Heid put up a post at 3:16, citing a post by Mike Fisher on Fox Sport Southwest at 9:50. Whitt is all bummed because Fox Sports Southwest didn’t give him credit. Nor did we. Nor did the Morning News.
Here’s where I sympathize with Whitt. He recently lost his job at 105.3 The Fan, and now he’s doing the best he can on his blog. A little link love from other outlets would help. I get that. I care. I really do. You know who doesn’t care? Nearly everyone else. And that includes Google.
When I googled “Richie Whitt and Greggo” to find Whitt’s epic series of posts about why he was fired, the top relevant hit was Unfair Park. Whitt’s site was the ninth hit, way down at the bottom of the page. So I just linked to Unfair Park. That’s essentially what happened with our post about Whitt’s AT&T scoop. Mike Mooney sent Jason a link to Whitt’s blog, Jason googled up the info, and it looked to him like Fox Sports Southwest was the first place to publish the news. So he linked to FSSW.
That’s how google works. Traffic breeds traffic. Right now, Whitt doesn’t have it. But he also doesn’t get it. Listen: no one cares who breaks the story about the AT&T thing. Once upon a time, when all we had was newspapers and TV, a scoop like that would stay fresh for an entire day. Maybe even an entire news cycle. You could own it for 24 hours. The internet won’t tolerate that. It’s fast (unless you’re still using dial-up service at Zac’s house). Looks to me like Whitt owned his scoop for about 80 minutes. Fisher had some additional details in his FSSW post (like when, precisely, the AT&T deal will go into effect), so he was almost certainly working on his story when Whitt hit “publish” on his. Just like that, Whitt was pushing a commodity that everyone already owned. That’s a bad business to be in.
Mr. Richie Whitt, don’t hate the player. Hate the game.
