oh Halo, it's definitely the other way around...the TP just parrots back what the national people are saying. (I like you, man, but we might as well argue about this to pass the time.) Just go through and look at a selection of Saints stories on nola.com -- almost every single one of them has a link to somewhere else as its source. "So-and-so is reporting that"..."Fujita said in an interview in the Cleveland paper that..." "League sources have announced"...almost none of what the TP or nola publishes is new or "scoop" type stuff!

This is why the TP is cutting back the newspaper to almost nothing -- they have almost nobody doing real reporting anymore, just cut-and-paste from other sources. It's like a glorified blog now.

The details of the story of the bounty crap and the Brees contract stalemate has consistently been broken by national media, not the TP. Florio has his own sources, which include Triplett and the local guys, but he also has also others that are far different from what Triplett has access to.

But -- I agree with you that Fox 8 has an obvious inside line on the Saints.

Everybody else was totally blindsided by it, but it only took Lee Zurik like half an hour in the back room on the phone, to find out the exact identity of the person who was spreading the ridiculous "wiretapping" story around. Zurik's reporting on that piece was awesome!