ESPN Balancing News Coverage With Original Show On Bonds

The notion that ESPN can cover Barry Bonds as a news subject while he is being paid for the Tollin/Robbins documentary on the network, “raised internal concerns about how to separate the network’s journalistic and entertainment sides,” according to Richard Sandomir of the N.Y. TIMES. ESPN Exec Editor John Walsh said that ESPN’s news coverage “will at no time intersect with ‘Bonds on Bonds.’” Walsh: “We had several meetings where objections were raised, and we fought through them all and said: ‘What if this happens? What if that happens?’ We felt we can live with it. Is it perfect? No. But to say the news division will be compromised is wrong.” Walsh said that the presence of the EOE unit “creates needed separation” between the company’s news and original entertainment units. Walsh likened the situation to NBC News covering Martha Stewart’s prison stay while the net’s entertainment division signed her to produce a daily show and an “Apprentice” spinoff. ESPN Exec VP/Content John Skipper added, “The question came up: ‘What if [Bonds] says something newsworthy on camera and we know about it?’ And the answer was, we can’t know about it [until after it has been televised]” (N.Y. TIMES, 3/11).

STRIKE WHILE IT’S HOT: The WALL STREET JOURNAL’s Jeffrey Trachtenberg writes two books about Bonds -– “Game of Shadows” by S.F. Chronicle writers Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, and Jeff Pearlman’s, “Love Me, Hate Me: Barry Bonds and the Making of an Antihero” — are “in a literary slugfest,” even though they were “never intended to compete with each other.” Gotham Books has moved the release date of “Shadows” to March 23 and 24 from March 27, and Pearlman’s book is scheduled for release on May 30, although HarperCollins “is trying to move up the date.” ESPN The Magazine this week will run an excerpt from Pearlman’s book. ESPN The Magazine had planned to run the excerpt in May, but Editor In Chief Gary Hoenig said, “We’re moving it up because the story is hot, and it’s competitive.” Sources said ESPN The Magazine paid $10,000-15,000 for the rights to the excerpt. Hoenig said that he was “disappointed that he wasn’t offered the rights to bid on ‘Game of Shadows’” because ESPN “might have stepped in and helped with an offer.” Sources said that SI paid $10,000-20,000 for the “Shadows” excerpt (WALL STREET JOURNAL, 3/13).