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Matt Leinart, Alex Smith Pics at TheDirty.com: The Future of Sports Media?

Michael David SmithPosted Apr 7th 2008 4:31PM by Michael David Smith


San Francisco 49ers quarterback Alex Smith (above) and Arizona Cardinals quarterback Matt Leinart had probably never heard of TheDirty.com a week ago, but they know all too well about it now.

Last week, an anonymous tipster e-mailed The Dirty pictures of Leinart partying at his home with Arizona State University co-eds. The story was, unsurprisingly, picked up by a number of blogs.

But then ESPN showed the photos on Around the Horn, Pardon the Interruption, SportsCenter and other shows. The Dirty -- with no journalistic standards, and little apparent interest in such standards -- got one of the biggest scoops of the NFL off-season.

And after The Dirty posted the above photo today -- which it says shows Smith partying in Mexico -- it's probably a matter of time before those turn up on ESPN, too.

So are sites like The Dirty the future of the sports media? In a phone interview, I asked one of the guys who runs The Dirty.

For starters, let's make clear what kind of site The Dirty is: None of the people affiliated with it will give out their real names; the person I talked to is identified as the site's president and CEO, and even he goes by a pseudonym, Ari Golden. And when I asked him whether the fact that his site broke this story makes him a journalist, Golden sounded horrified.

"No, definitely not," Golden said. "This is definitely supposed to be for entertainment. We say right on the page that the information you read here could be inaccurate, it could be false."

Golden is correct, it's right there at the bottom. But is it really fair to post things that have the potential to damage a person's reputation and then simply point to a disclaimer if they get information wrong?

Says Golden, "If someone reports something to us and we think it's funny, we'll post it, but as far as reporting news, looking for news, reporters – that's not our specialty. Our specialty is to take incoming news or pictures and put our own take on it."

Even if the site does no active reporting and relies solely on "incoming" news, there's no question that The Dirty is breaking news. The same week that it published the Leinart photos, it also published pictures and a video showing a University of Arizona football player sticking his hand between the legs of a woman who appeared to be under the influence. The player was indefinitely suspended from the team but was not charged with any crime.



The Dirty is getting a lot of attention for its pictures of football players, but Golden says the site is much less interested in celebrity gossip than it is in regular-people gossip: The site cared mostly about posting pictures of regular college students partying, and it was just an added traffic perk (according to Alexa the site's traffic quadrupled) that they were partying with someone famous.

"We usually focus more on the non-celebrity aspect of it," Golden said. "The story (on the Leinart photos) for us -- which we can't 100% percent verify -- is that the evidence is pretty strong that the girls were underage. (The Dirty's readers) backed that up by sending us their MySpace and Facebook pages."

This interest in regular people -- not celebrities -- is why The Dirty views itself as the blogosphere's equivalent of reality television: Bringing to light the unscripted misadventures of ordinary Joes and Janes.

As for the mainstream that published the Leinart photos? "They're losing focus on what I think they should really be reporting on, which is (athletes') performance on the field," Golden says.

It's unclear why someone publishing these photos would object to ESPN's commenting on them. As David Sarno of the Los Angeles Times wrote about The Dirty, "It's hard to take that civics lesson from this particular set of guys."

Frankly, it's hard to find anyone to take civics lessons from: If we look to ESPN, we'll inevitably be disappointed by the arbitrary decisions the network will make about which embarrassing photos to air and which to ignore. And most other mainstream sports media entities are working too hard to catch up to ESPN to pass up such opportunities to grab people's attention.

From now on, like it or not, candid salacious pictures are news.

Tags: Alex+Smith, AlexSmith, Matt+Leinart, MattLeinart

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