Attribution fights occur much less often these days.
And in the world of Twitter, there are often various reporters on the same story who tweet things out at a similar time; most have gotten a lot better about citing who broke news first, as a bit of an industry courtesy. And if it’s all within a few minutes, it’s always kind of pointless to get annoyed that someone may have missed another person breaking the story first.
Today’s big NBA news: Andre Iguodala returning to the Golden State Warriors.
Source: Andre Iguodala — a three-time Warriors champion and 2015 Finals MVP — agreed to sign a deal to return to Golden State. The Brooklyn Nets were also a finalist.
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) August 6, 2021
That’s Shams Charania’s tweet. Reading that, you’d think he was breaking the story. Shams breaks news all the time. That isn’t in question! But today, that tweet stuck out because it came 25 minutes after the story was actually broken, via Jonathan Abrams at the New York Times, who interviewed Iguodala for the report.
Andre Iguodala tells @NYTSports that he is returning to the @warriors.
“The relationship with the fans, the relationship with the Bay, the opportunity to end it here, was just something special.”–@andre https://t.co/rByRkaNEbK— Jonathan Abrams (@Jpdabrams) August 6, 2021
So, yeah, that’s not a great look. One person who noticed: Iguodala, who replied five minutes after Shams tweeted.
@Jpdabrams and the @nytimes was the source pro
— andre (@andre) August 6, 2021
Athletes do occasionally directly call out reporters, but almost never over attribution issues. Just a minute after the Iguodala tweet, Shams offered this addition to his original tweet:
Iguodala told @Jpdabrams about his plans to return to the Bay.
— Shams Charania (@ShamsCharania) August 6, 2021
Would he have done that if Iguodala hadn’t tweeted at him directly and publicly? We’ll never know.
Either way it livened up a Friday morning.
About Jay Rigdon
Jay is a columnist at Awful Announcing. He is not a strong swimmer. He is probably talking to a dog in a silly voice at this very moment.