For a supposedly dying sport, boxing certainly enjoys a host of news websites, testifying to the legions of fans that follow the sweet science. However, like so much material on the internet, a lot of that supposed boxing journalism is of very poor quality. For the most part, this lack of quality is merely the work of bloggers who make up for their shortcoming in knowledge and insight with sheer enthusiasm. In some instances, though, serious ethical flaws make what looks like a sound boxing news website little more than an advertising sham.
A few of the major boxing websites are merely marketing tools for a given manager or promoter. These sites publish mostly press releases and interviews with their guys, and their guys alone. When these camouflaged bits of marketing hackwork do anything else, those actions are limited to trashing the boxer who beat one of the guys in their stable. Mouthpieces like these are not sources of news and should stop behaving as if they were. Plenty of promoters or managers run openly promotional sites, so why pretend to be anything else?
Other so-called boxing news sites fail to make the mark at the editorial level. Everyone makes mistakes, but some boxing news sites — including a few that are very popular — publish material with no copy editing whatsoever, leaving glaring typographical, grammar and even factual errors. The same sites show little or no editorial steerage, publishing half a dozen articles on exactly the same subject and expressing exactly the same information and opinions, and too often all half dozen articles come from the same author. Proboxing-fans.com may publish fight previews and post-fight commentaries on the same subject at times, but they at least present the material from different angles.
Another issue stemming from this lack of editorial standards is that it often seems like anyone who is a crony of the editors can publish, even if the writer in question clearly doesn’t know that a southpaw leads with a right jab rather than a left.
Quality on the internet is becoming a serious issue. According to many alarmists working for dying newspapers around the country, the internet is awash in garbage media products and is destroying the real news. Just ask the Internet Content Syndication Council (ICSC), an organization with some high-powered members that is pushing for internet content standards such as the basic quality-control step of footnoting articles.
I don’t think turning the internet into an academic paper, where no one who isn’t a professional journalist working for a national newspaper can be taken seriously without citing a major media source written by (you guessed it) a professional journalist working for a national newspaper, is the answer. However, the ICSC does have the right idea when it endorses full disclosure of the writer’s or publisher’s interest in a given topic. That notion has been widely adopted or was already in force with many internet media companies, such as Demand Media and Associated Content.
Sadly, these issues are infiltrating the world of boxing news sites, and many of them now fall far short of the mark and reveal serious ethical flaws in the process. My own yardstick for integrity and standards is Secondsout.com. The website does not place an amateurish premium posting ten articles a day in order to maintain an ever-fresh front page. Every article is sagacious and well-written, and Secondsout.com presents a reasonably complete, balanced picture of professional boxing.
Since I first discovered it years ago, the further a website gets away from the magazine-like Secondsout.com model and set of standards, the worse I think the site is. Sadly, that describes many a boxing “news” site in operation today, but fortunately not Proboxing-fans.com.
