Exhibition bouts and Newspaper decisions....

Yeah, I'd like to know more about how that worked.

I've seen researchers cite numerous views of newspaper scorers -- their accounts of who won -- on fights that I cannot fathom how or why newspapers from around the country would cover.

If it's a non-title bout in Pittsburgh, how the heck could papers from New York to Chicago to Cleveland to Los Angeles to Texas all have reporters there? Why would they have someone there? How many of those accounts (many of which didn't have by-lines so we don't know who wrote them) were by one person sending his account to multiple papers (so you might have 6 papers favoring one fighter, but can we be sure that's six different people agreeing on scoring rather than one guy supplying his account to six different papers?).

The whole thing seems a bit curious to me. Major title fights I can understand, but it stretches credibility to me that papers far and wide were covering bouts halfway across the country which had no consequence.

For instance, and not to pick on Harry Greb, his win over Tom Burns -- a guy who had won 3 of 14 bouts -- cites a newspaper account from Nevada (as well as Pittsburgh and Detroit, but those had writers' names attached to them so would seem to be legit). And Greb was a last-minute sub in that fight. Not saying he didn't win, but what's a Nevada writer doing there covering it?