As noted on Friday, Buffalo Bills season ticket holders are up in arms about having to pay as much as $50,000 per seat in personal seat license fees just to get equivalent seats at the team’s new stadium, for which they and other New York state taxpayers are putting up just over a billion dollars. Only … maybe they’re not? That’s the bold conclusion of Buffalo News NFL columnist Ryan O’Halloran after talking with, let’s see, an “industry source”:
“The truth is very different from what’s out there,” an industry source told me. “The community is super behind it.”
So let’s try to picture what happened here: O’Halloran, after reading about disgruntlement among Bills fans over PSLs, decided to look into the matter. Rather than talk to any Bills fans, though, he called someone in the seat-license industry — possibly someone with the Bills or Legends Entertainment, the part–Dallas Cowboys–owned company that the Bills owners hired to conduct the PSL rollout — who said people are signing up at a “really exciting” rate. (The source also provided a bunch of fact-adjacent stats like “the average time of visit [to a PSL showing] is one hour, 40 minutes.”) We don’t know how the source knows this, or if they’re just straight-up lying about it, because O’Halloran allows the source to characterize what’s going on without revealing who they are or their potential self-interest.
This is just a flagrant violation of journalistic ethics, which say that anonymity should never be granted to people who are trafficking in opinion or speculation, and sources should always be identified in as much detail as possible so readers can be clear on their potential conflicts of interests. Honestly, this column alone should be grounds for discipline and/or firing of both O’Halloran and whichever Buffalo News editor greenlit it, unless there’s some extenuating (looks at calendar) … ohhhh, I get it, this is an April Fools joke! I take it all back, this is an extraordinarily clever satire of terrible sportswriting that bends over backwards to serve team owner interests, well played!
(If despite all this you still would prefer to hear from actual Bills fans about what Bills fans think, head over to the Bills season ticket holder page on Facebook, where you can read such sentiments as “I tried to get information about the PSL’s in other sections, like more towards the 30 yard line or the 20 yard line they couldn’t tell me” and “I bet all these people sold time shares before being hired to pitch these PSL’s” and “Will the Bills revoke my psl if I [resell some of my tickets and] don’t get a $5,000/year ticket reseller license like the Sabres are doing?” All good things for local journalists to investigate, if the Buffalo News has any left on staff.)
Psst! [Opens trenchcoat] Want to buy a PSL, buddy?
The Chicago Bears and Cleveland Browns are curled up in a corner crying about how terrible it is to play in a 20 year old open air stadium on the Great Lakes. There’s snow, wind, wind driven ice pellets, sub zero cold, fog, we just can’t take it any more!!! Chicago/Cuyahoga County, we need a multi billion dollar dome, and we’ll even tease Arlington Heights and Brook Park that we’ll build the stadium there. Richfield worked out great for the Cavaliers, right? So what is Buffalo doing where the weather is even worse than in Cleveland or Chicago? Building an open air stadium on Lake Erie, right on the lake effect snow bullseye. Makes perfect sense if your objective is to have New York taxpayers and Bills fans throw over a billion dollars down a snow filled rathole so the Bills owner can come back in 20 years demanding billions for a dome.
I was going to guess that the reason the “average” stay on the PSL fractional-ownership/marketing website was so long is that people were staying to leave enraged/threatening/apocalyptic comments directed at the Bills and their marketing partners… but now I don’t have to.
Either that or the whole thing was calendar related, which would require that the head honchos theoretically in charge actually understood that the entire world does not solely revolve around their ever spiralling revenue growth.
In a just world, you provide anonymity to sources to protect the weak from the strong. But it’s increasingly used so that someone can say something juicy without having their name attached to it, and since (what used to be called) journalists live for clicks, juicy it shall be.
(And $50k just for the right to spend more on tickets? GTFOH with that. These people whose lives revolve around the local football team are just sad.)
I never actually went to journalism school, but as a now-possibly-ex journalist, my approach was that it was unethical to present useless information as if it were useful.
A quote from an anonymous “industry source” is useless information.
If the author had accurately framed the quote, maybe that would be ok. For example, if they wrote “An industry source, who refused to go on the record, assured (us) that fans will embrace the PSL model, but (we) were unable to independently corroborate that sentiment with any available survey data or even anecdotal evidence from social media.” That has the value of being 100% accurate, but it is also probably not newsworthy.
Reader polls or reprints of irate tweets aren’t really scientifically accurate either, but that would be more valuable.
As we saw with your coverage of the Chicago situation, there needs to be more clarity on what happens to the PSLs if the stadium ceases to exist.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAjxn2US7J8?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&w=640&h=360]
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