UGA blog finds new home
Morning all. As I’ve said a couple of times this week, we’re converting this blog over to a WordPress platform and it will be a permanent move the first of next week.
Those of you who are regulars probably know that I’m not what you’d call techno-wizard when it comes to these things. But from what I understand the technology offered in this new format should make the blogging and commenting experience better for all. Of course, I’ll be learning as we go along, too. But I’m hoping to provide more pictures and video and things like that which should bring the blog more to life.
Of course, this blog is nothing without all you guys so I want to heartily invite (read: beg) you to come over to the new site by CLICKING HERE ON THE NEW ADDRESS and save it in your browsers. As of Monday, Feb. 23rd, this will be the permanent home of the UGA blog you so love or, in the case of some of you, love to loathe. If you’d prefer to copy and paste or just memorize, the new address is: http://blogs.ajc.com/uga-sports-blog/.
See at the new place!
AJC > Sports > UGA > Blog > Archives > 2007 > June > 18
Monday, June 18, 2007
On bias, objectivity and bad news
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
I’ve been surfing the Internet, like I do every day and it’s interesting to see the debate that’s going on in the fan forum over on Rivals’ uga site (www.ugarivals.com??). They’re going back and forth about the AJC being a news organization that is biased against UGA. There are a few supporters of my employer but far more detractors.
This really surprises me. It seems as though the UGA fans, our at least those most fervent ones that subscribe to this paid site, believe it’s the job of a newspaper or news organization to be a booster of the school and/or its athletics department. By contrast, they believe we make it our full-time job to discredit the school. Nothing could be farther from the truth.
I’m here to tell you we work very, very hard to be objective in everything we do, whether it be cover UGA or Georgia Tech athletics or Coca-Cola or Home Depot or the state house or the DOT. The pure fact of the matter is my bosses think enough of UGA athletics and local people’s interest in it to employ two full-time sports reporters that live in Athens in order to cover everything that goes on there.
If you were to do a tally of the stories Carter and I write, you’d find that far more are positive or at least innocuous in nature (see Carter’s story on Mark Richt today) than the ones that have to do with arrests or NCAA investigations or Matthew Stafford lifting a keg, the latter of which was thoroughly plastered all over that same fan forum and others throughout CyberSpace the first day they fell into the public eye.
A great deal of what we do at newspapers has to do with watchdog reporting, which very simply means that business is being done in a righteous way without abusing powers bestowed upon it by the public. That’s important no matter what the entity being covered. But in my humble opinion, I think UGA benefits far more from the full-time attention we give it on a daily basis and I’m pretty sure Claude Felton, the Bulldogs’ media relations czar, would tell anybody who asked the exact same thing.
I think the ultimate gauge of our credibility in that regard is the fact that Tech fans are convinced we’re UGA-biased. If both groups think we favor the other, then we must be doing something right.
But that’s my obvious stance on the subject. What is yours? Are we fair? Do we focus too much on the negative? Are we getting it about right? And while we’re at it, tell us what you think we could be doing better. In this age of interactivity, we definitely want to know what our most loyal readers think.
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