As you might expect, for the past few hours, ESPN has been completely committed to LeBron James and the Miami Heat winning the NBA Championship. Move over, Euro 2012, this is King James’ house. I get that. What I don’t get, however, is why ESPN is spamming RSS readers with the same story over and over again. Maybe they really want the world to know LeBron finally won his ring. Or maybe they just suck at using RSS. You decide.
The reason for this article is because starting about 13 hours ago, ESPN has been submitting the same article with the same headline to their RSS feed. Again, there could be a couple of reasons for doing this, but even with additional evidence that suggests otherwise, I find it hard to believe the feed managers at Bristol, Connecticut are this bad at RSS. Take a look at the following screenshots and you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about:
For those of you keeping count, that’s six submissions of the same article, with the title of “LeBron, Heat throttle Thunder to win NBA title,” and yes, the link goes to the same page on ESPN every single time. But wait, there’s more where this came from:
Making it a total nine times the same story has shown up in ESPN’s RSS feed. So what gives? Either ESPN isn’t very good at RSS or they really, really want the world to know that yes, LeBron James has finally won an NBA title. Considering the article’s lede–“The critics can stop now. King James is finally a champion.”–reads like ESPN has become LeBron’s biggest defender, and they’re willing to spam your RSS reader to prove it.
While there’s also evidence of ESPN not being that great at RSS:
It’s more fun to believe ESPN has become the biggest LeBron defender the world has ever seen.
