Time to broach a topic that I find very interesting personally.
If you aren’t familiar with fantasy sports (football, baseball and hockey seem to be the most prevalent), they are essentially run in leagues where each person picks (via draft or auction) a team of players from different actual professional teams. They then follow those players statistically in real life, and the team that does the best combined job wins the week.
It’s a chance to be a general manager, of sorts.
These leagues are sometimes run for money, and sometimes just for fun.
These are very popular, and as you might imagine, many sports journalism outlets have reporters that are hooked on the activity, and they wish to make work leagues.
I know personally of some outlets that have their own fantasy leagues, usually with a cash incentive.
So is this an ethical problem?
That’s a tough question to answer.
When money is involved, it almost seems to approach gambling, but not quite.
In the end, I’m probably a bit too invested in fantasy sports myself to give an unbiased opinion.
I will just say that I can see where someone might see this as a potential conflict of interest or problem when conducted within the newsroom.
Meanwhile, can you believe I managed to get Joe Mauer, Evan Longoria AND Roy Halladay in my auction draft league?!
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