Rewriting History One Press Release At A Time

Mini-rant ahead … the briefs column on the front page of USA Today refers to a new service ESPN just announced. That would be the MVNO now known as Mobile ESPN, something that ESPN announced last December (12/1/04, to be exact) and has discussed publicly in numerous trade show appearances and at investor conferences. USA Today isn’t alone in treating it as something new — CTAM Smart Brief, which has written about it numerous times in the last 10 months, made its lead headline “ESPN announces mobile phone service” even though the CNET News.com story among the links clearly stated otherwise. I’m prepared for another wave of “ESPN announces” a new service in February when Mobile ESPN launches.
To its credit, ESPN only framed the rebranding as new. But earlier this month I ran into this from the company perspective when the New York Times Company tried to manage the start of TimesSelect as an announcement of a new service, not a launch of something previously announced. If you look at much of the news coverage, you’d never know the subject had been in the public domain for months.

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