By Leonard Shapiro
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, March 13, 2007 11:10 AM

We're going multi-media for a slight change of pace this week, the better to focus briefly on one of the more entertaining and popular features of many daily and Sunday newspaper sports sections--the weekly notes column, an art form if done properly and occasionally a minefield as one of my long-time colleagues in Boston found out a few weeks ago.

No one ever did it any better than the late, greater than great Shirley Povich, The Washington Post's long-time sports editor and columnist, who's classic Sunday notes columns were filled with newsy tidbits, evocative anecdotes, colorful quotes and the occasional controversy, all reported and brilliantly written by Povich his own self in the course of also producing five or six other columns during the week.

Over the years, sports editors also became enamored with the notes model and required their reporters to produce similar columns focused on their particular sport of expertise. The Boston Globe, blessed with an inordinate amount of space back in the 1970s and '80s, often featured Sunday notes columns that ran 60, 70 and 80 column inches -- 3,000 to 4,000 words a week, but who's counting with people like Peter Gammons (baseball), Bob Ryan (NBA) and Will McDonough (NFL), among others? It was an absolute must read for both fans of their sports and fellow scribes themselves.

In recent years, Ron Borges took over the NFL column from the late McDonough and also produced reams of copy every Sunday. In the interest of full disclosure I must also say that I've known Borges for more than three decades. I've admired his writing, his reporting and his courage in taking on controversial subjects, including throwing some heavy haymakers at Patriots' head coach Bill Belichick, despite three Super Bowl titles in the last five years.

Two weeks ago, Borges was suspended without pay for two months by his newspaper for essentially lifting verbatim material for his NFL notes column that appeared originally in the Tacoma, Washington News Tribune under the byline of Seahawks beat writer Mike Sando. There's no question it was a dead solid lift of information, and should never have happened, even if it seems more like a matter of simply lazy cutting and pasting when a simple rewrite of basic information would have been just as easy to do, without such a dire consequence.

Borges and many other sportswriters belong to what are commonly referred to as notes networks. All around the NFL, some football writers contribute a weekly digest of news and notes involving the teams they cover on a restricted web site available only to the other writers on the network. It's usually in the form of raw data and forms the fodder for many notes columns that eventually wind up in print.

The Washington Post and some other publications have forbidden reporters to get involved in these networks, but many newspapers still allow this information exchange, indeed, even encourage it. Often they will put an editor's note at the bottom of such columns stating something like "information for this story was compiled from original reporting, wire services and material provided by other beat writers, newspapers and web sites." It's generally a catch-all description that at least informs readers that the reporter used a wide variety of sources and resources to compile the column. Mostly though, it's a tag line that generally seems to condone a somewhat questionable journalistic practice.

In most network notes exchanges, the participating scribes simply regurgitate what they've already reported in their own newspapers, with the assumption that the other network writers will rewrite the basic nuts and bolts information, occasionally adding their own opinionated spin to it, perhaps making a call or two to see if there's even more to the story than originally reported, maybe a local angle that would make it more germane to their own readers.

Sando, apparently, simply put his own finished copy on the notes network site Borges was using, and Borges apparently lifted it virtually verbatim for whatever reason. Maybe he was pressed for time. Maybe he had three other stories he was working on. Maybe he just got a little lazy and needed to add 300 words to a 3,500-word column and was running on empty. Still, at the very least Sando's boilerplate information -- remember boys and girls, we're talking football fodder here, not Tolstoy -- should have been rewritten, and not cut and pasted into Borges's March 4 Sunday notes column.

But the real bottom line here is that these notes networks probably ought to be eliminated. They were started many years before the internet provided an endless stream of information available at the touch of a keyboard. ESPN, Yahoo, Google, CNN/SI all have extensive coverage of virtually every sport, and the same goes for most newspaper websites.

In the NFL, every team has its own web sites, including transcripts of interviews with players and coaches gathered during open locker room sessions or from conference calls with reporters from other cities. One website, theredzone.org, links to newspaper football stories in every NFL city chronologically on a daily basis and, quite frankly makes me wonder why newspapers still run these notes columns in the first place.

Denver Post sportswriter Dave Krieger, a former Denver Broncos beat man, recently wrote on the "sportsjournalists.com" web site that "this process (for notes columns) was approved by the management of all the papers that participated for which it was a cheap way to produce what appeared to be a locally generated national notes column." In other words, a lot of sports editors out there liked the finished product, and took a wink, wink don't ask, don't tell approach to the way it actually was produced. How else to explain those same editors allowing their reporters to participate in the first place?

In any case, Borges made a large mistake. We can debate until the cows come home whether it was a firing offense (no way, in my opinion) or whether the two-month suspension was appropriate (even that seems a tad excessive). But until these insidious notes networks are eliminated completely, why should we be surprised that the occasional abuse will occur?

And by the way, speaking of abuses, there's another despicable practice in the sports broadcasting business that generally goes mostly unnoticed by the viewing and listening public -- the dead, solid lifting of information from the morning newspaper that's read on the air without any attribution whatsoever to the original source.

As another contributor to sportsjournalists.com recently wrote, "several times, one of our local affiliates has been caught flat out lifting features from our sports section (stuff they could have gotten anywhere else). One of us steals something from another paper without attribution and we're pilloried (and rightfully so). TV and radio steals from the papers and it's ignored. Why is that?"

Leonard Shapiro can be reached at badgerlen@hotmail.com or badgerlen@aol.com.