The wonderful words of sports reportering
The dark art of telling people about breaking news has spawned a journalistic dialect of its own and it's absolutely hilarious.
At 10 a.m. last Friday, ESPN’s Pete Thamel informed us that Kalen DeBoer was “the focus of Alabama’s search, with some clarity expected in the near future.”
At 11:21 a.m., Thamel stated that DeBoer was “on the cusp of getting the Alabama job” and at 12:19 p.m. all uncertainty was erased when Thamel stated DeBoer “has informed Washington officials he’s taken the job at Alabama.”
It was – quite simply – an absolute master class in the incremental reporting of breaking news as well as a sample serving of the diction and vocabulary that are becoming a journalistic dialect unto themselves. A wild concoction in which the raw information is cut with flattery, the actual source of the ingredients is inevitably disguised and there’s a great deal of hyperbole shaken into the whole breathless concoction until it is hard to classify just what it is. It may have hints of traditional journalism, it leaves you with the unmistakable tang of marketing.