Some quotes here stand out to me in the context of things that are discussed on this board.
https://deadspin.com/the-mississippi-state-fan-who-took-his-revenge-on-ole-m-1819064586?utm_campaign=socialflow_deadspin_twitter&utm_source=deadspin_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow
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Rumor fuels message boards, the public squares of college sports; it makes minor celebrities of men (they're always men) with vague "sources" who manage to see the world more clearly than the people who are actually paid to write about that world. What marks Robertson as different from this familiar archetype is what he did next. In fits and spurts, over the course of a few years, Robertson became the journalist he thought other actual journalists were refusing to be.
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Robertson knew there were boots on the ground all over the state, but he was hesitant to say anything publicly. Instead, he figured he would farm the story out to those with the institutional power to investigate.
"Absolutely nobody was interested," he says. "One thing I've learned about sports journalists, a lot of them wanna just go to the ballgame, get good seats, and eat free food."
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"On the one hand," he writes in his book, "you had a popular administrator, Bjork, making claims in the paper that most Mississippians have turned to for news within their state for decades. On the other hand, there was this long-haired, tattooed, Mississippi State Bulldog's sports writer, riding a wave of popularity, which social media and message boards had provided, who was the lone voice among media outlets calling the whole Ole Miss message into question.
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To Robertson, the fact that Ole Miss was hiding the names of the boosters and supporters listed in the NCAA's letter was unreasonableother schools faced with the same dilemma, he discovered, had revealed the names of their boosters. So he did some digging, figured out what names were behind the redactions, and then went on The Boneyard with an offer to give them to any reporter who asked. None did. To Robertson, the incuriosity of the state's reporting press was absurd. Here he was offering a huge scoop involving the biggest sports story in Mississippi and no one would take him up on it. "The longer I waited for in-state media to do anything, the more frustrated I got," he says. "I just thought to myself, 'What are these people doing with their lives?'"
https://deadspin.com/the-mississippi-state-fan-who-took-his-revenge-on-ole-m-1819064586?utm_campaign=socialflow_deadspin_twitter&utm_source=deadspin_twitter&utm_medium=socialflow