HispanicBusiness

There appears to be a fascinating sexual tension growing between old journalism and new journalism. A startled and exposed Tiger Woods discovered this the hard way, when both journalisms barged into his bedroom together with a kind of zeal that had no precedent in American sports.

The younger generation, led by peer idols such as Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, is less repressed, less inhibited and less interested in previous rules of decency and decorum. New journalism is more voyeuristic, more reckless and more entitled. The marketplace wants, craves, lusts for naked gossip, and the result is Sports America keeps peeping in on the famous even if it means trampling the not famous, and fairness, in the breathless need to make private _ and privates _ public .

Brett Favre's penis. The feet of Rex Ryan's wife. And this week we got a leer into Mark Sanchez's romping grounds courtesy of a 17-year-old girl who really didn't seem to want that published _ soft porn dressed as hard news, a new publishing standard erected before our widened eyes. Deadspin.com keeps pushing sports journalism's boundaries and keeps getting rewarded with clicks, exposure, money, growth, coverage and popularity. GQ just did a feature on the website's editor; HBO's Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel is working on another. Deadspin is doing to sports, and sports journalism, what Hustler founder Larry Flynt once did to America. Soul-selling for profit or a sole, selling prophet?

This is how it is for both pioneers and peddlers; they can survive and flourish even amid rot. The publishing industry decays all around Deadspin.com in books, newspapers and just about all magazines except those that traffic in gossip because young people allegedly don't want to read. But, no, they want to read. They just don't want to read what old people want them to read. You can point out, as Vanity Fair did, that Jersey Shore has now had a longer run on TV than Arrested Development. "Deeper we go, into the shallow!" you can wail as America gets dumber. But it is like selling the merits of the library while straining to be heard above the thump-thump-thump music in the nightclub.

The marketplace has spoken, so journalism shifts, by choice, by demand. Somebody will give the public what it craves, whether it is in politics or porn, because it is ultimately the journalism business , not the journalism charity. Young people and their word-of-mouth is what makes almost anything popular, so the choice for old people is to either follow or get left behind. Oh, you can object. You can tell the kids to get the hell off your damn lawn. But you and your sensibilities will die first, and the last sounds you will hear before expiring is the kids and their echoing laughter.

What Deadspin.com did this week was wrong by all the previous measurements, although those measurements mummify more every day. It wasn't news to report that a 17-year-old girl had maybe slept with Sanchez. That age is legal in New York. It wasn't news that she had photographed proof of Sanchez's bedroom. (This is what The Kardashian Generation has wrought; the famous get screwed, and the screwed get famous.)

The girl wanted it published, then didn't, but Deadspin published it anyway... and traffic soared. And you know what happened next, right? The New York Post followed by publishing the girl's name and picture for her high school classmates _ something even Deadspin avoided. This is how it happened with Favre and Rex Ryan's wife, too _ old media deciding to follow what everyone was talking about because that's where the money, eyes and marketplace were.

Where's the line now? Wherever you put it. One person publishes it, and the crowd will give you your answer soon enough. Sometimes it will feel like democracy, and sometimes it will feel like a lynching, but this is how it works with capitalism. The marketplace always decides. And new media certainly has a million merits, as Egypt is now learning. It is just hard to argue that what Deadspin did to that 17-year-old is any kind of right, no matter how subjective "right" or "journalism" might be and no matter how many ways the entitled try to rationalize bad behavior by filing it away under a new kind of "news" or "public's need to know."

But the public craves it, and there is profit in it, and so the line blurs and shifts, and that'll trouble you a bit if you care about fairness first. Because we're headed fast toward the place where a gay athlete gets outed or a 17-year-old harms herself because of this kind of public shame. The difference between what just happened to that 17-year-old and the illegality of taping ESPN's Erin Andrews nude in the privacy of her hotel room is merely one of degrees.

There is the feeling that a divorced and broken Tiger Woods should have been more discrete, should have known better. But he couldn't have. The rules changed on him, and for all sports figures, while he was getting undressed. And the lines journalism once wasn't willing to cross keep getting blurred or moved by our nation's TMZ-ization.

Let me tell you a story. John Amaechi of the Utah Jazz became my friend while I was working on a magazine piece on him. He eventually revealed to me, while still playing, that he was gay. I kept his secret even though it would have been a huge story. This was complicated as a journalist, but it wasn't as a human. I can be accused of protecting him, of being biased, of not doing my job. He decided to come out after he was done playing.

It would have been wrong to ruin or betray him, obviously.

But it would have been rewarded, and never more so than today.

And if you care about fairness, if you care about decency, if you care about being human, if you care about anything beyond the marketplace getting what it pleases, it should concern you that sports journalism's blurred line keeps inching by degrees away from "right" and closer by dollars to "reward."