I had seen William Rhoden’s column in The New York Times yesterday, and like this emailer, I was somewhat surprised to see it get remade at the same URL following the Patriots beatdown of Jets.

Hi Bruce,

I’m a regular BSMW reader, and as such I thought you might be interested in something I caught in the NYT coverage of the Jets-Pats rivalry. On the Times’ site yesterday, I saw this column from William Rhoden.

That article no longer exists on the Times’ site; it’s been replaced, at the same URL, with this. (The modified article went up within a few minutes of last night’s game ending.) You’ll notice the new headline no longer references the Patriots’ “crumbling empire;” similar changes are made throughout the article.

Now, to my mind, these are both cases of pretty crappy journalism, using the thinnest of pretenses to bring up Spygate without really saying anything new. However, it’s my understanding that the Times’ policy is to note corrections, changes, or updates to articles like this instead of just throwing lines like “The shift has occurred: the Jets are in ascendancy, while New England is in retrograde” down the memory hole.

I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this.

Best,
D

PS: One more amusing modification. Rhoden, pre-game: “The shift was set in motion three seasons ago by a moral misstep by Belichick. The Patriots empire began to unravel the day New England was caught cheating.” Rhoden, post-game: “If New England does not win another title under Belichick, critics can say that a shift took place three seasons ago.” Hedging his bets, I guess.

I last checked bostonsportsmedia.com just before midnight last night, and all was well. When I got up this morning, there was a screen prompting me to install WordPress (which is the software platform that runs the backend of the site.) – not good. All visitors to the site were seeing the same thing. Attempts to re-install all failed, and with a look at my database, it appears that all the data (meaning posts) have been deleted.

I have some old backups available, but ironically, I had just tried to do a backup last week, had gotten an error, made a note to look into it further, but never got to it. So I might be screwed.

Worst-case, I’ll have to import all the old data, and might have lost the last few months worth of posts. That seems to be the likely scenario at this point, but I’m waiting for a response from the host.

As to who would do this…I don’t know. I don’t think it has anything to do with the content of the site, so I don’t think Ron Borges or Tony Massarotti are the masterminds behind this. I have my share of scary crazy people who like to email threats to me (we’re looking at you, Jacob) but I think this was more of a random thing. Someone saw that they could get in somehow, and did so.

At the moment, I’m still waiting to be contacted by the support department. We’ll see what happens. I’ll try to keep you updated here.

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