“Don’t you remember the time you told me, ‘If you ain’t first, you’re last’?… I’ve live my whole life by that!” — Ricky Bobby

Hundreds attended, thousands were invested, and millions watched as LeBron James gathered the world around him for his decision to take his talents to South Beach in 2010. The aftermath was harsh as the city of Cleveland watched their basketball Savior choose another fan base over them. Many reporters, both local and national, were left with their head in their hands as they had wagered a career’s worth of credibility on sources and information that turned to quicksand as the impenetrable camp around James came to show their indecisiveness — James himself didn’t even know his own answer until the day of the announcement.

But what may have been the worst takeaway from that entire media circus was that not only did those journalists covering James’ decision survive their hasty and premature reports, their renown grew from it.

Fast forward to the present day. Thanks to the masterful work of Lee Jenkins at Sports Illustrated, the world — and I may very well mean ‘the world’— knows about the return to Cleveland. Even my 50+ year-old mother, who has not an ounce of care for the game of basketball in her body — knows of James’ decision to return home and lead Ohio’s crusade to bring an NBA Championship to the city of Cleveland.

That is now common knowledge, but the way it became common knowledge seems to be at the expense of journalistic integrity.

I’ll admit this: I loved the LeBron James circus. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t care less where he ended up— I’d watch him regardless. For two weeks I logged on to Twitter and Facebook to see “sources” saying this and “sources” saying that. It annoying, sure, but I took it as what it was.

None of these people knew where James was going to end up.

It was a total crap shoot, and for me, that was OK; I enjoyed all the memes, the jokes and the speculations because my job wasn’t on the line. I was simply an observer — sitting back and watching the world burn, if you will.

But for people like Chris Broussard, Brian Windhorst, Chris Sheridan and all these other media machines whose jobs now required them to spew out any kind of whisper in the wind they may hear about where James was going to end up, was kind of sad — and, in a way, I feel bad for them.

Jeff Pearlman of Sports Illustrated wrote a piece on his personal blog talking about how reporting major news has changed over the years. He talked about how Sports Illustrated was built on the principle of facts, if you weren’t 100 percent concrete on what you were writing, you didn’t write it.

But in 2014, every single person with Internet connection is a journalist, whether they want to be seen that way or not.