I just read a quick ESPN.com article about how Tom Brady isn’t focusing on his pending free agency after the 2010 season, despite Philip Rivers securing a guaranteed $38 million from the San Diego Chargers yesterday. I then hopped over to SI.com to see if they had any other breaking news and I find the exact same headline. I click into the article and I discover that not only are they similar, the text of the articles are exactly the same. I’ve taken a screen shot of each and you can see that they are the same:
While the SI.com article acknowledges that the report is from the Associated Press, the ESPN.com article publishes it under the ESPN.com News Services name, with a note at the bottom that information from ESPN.com’s Len Pasquarelli and the AP was used in the report. If that is the case, then doesn’t SI.com have the obligation to state that Pasquarelli contributed to the article’s content? Or is ESPN.com just taking too much credit?