Commentary: All LeBron, all the time — when will it end?

It’s Monday morning. Do you know what LeBron James had for dinner last night?

If you do — or can quote a “source” about it — there’s a good chance that information will be instantly re-tweeted, cited by dozens of journalists and rapidly appear on ESPN’s bottom-of-the-screen news scroll.

OK — that may be a little extreme. But only a little.

At a time when there’s an incredible amount of significant news in the sports world — the World Cup, Wimbledon, new allegations of doping by Lance Armstrong, the bankruptcy of Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers — there seems to be only one story that matters for much of the U.S. sports media: The wooing of LeBron. And it’s always “LeBron” — James is now on a first-name recognition basis with most of the world, like that other basketball player with the unusual first name, Kobe.

Since the 25-year-old pro basketball star officially became a free agent Thursday, every detail of James’ impending decision — he will either sign with a new team or remain with the Cleveland Cavaliers — has been covered with breathless intensity not seen since Tiger Woods crashed his Escalade last Thanksgiving. Over the last few days, media outlets including ESPN, Yahoo!, the Chicago Tribune and TMZ have rushed to publicize details such as what shoes James wore to a meeting, the name of the Broadway show attended by a player who might soon play with James, and the make of the SUV that ferried one team owner to a session with James.

There’s been far more ink and HTML code spent on conjecture, second-hand quotes or rumors regarding James’ state of mind, his perceptions of the teams pursuing him, and the potential moves of players who may join him in Miami, Cleveland, New York, New Jersey, Chicago, L.A. or wherever he chooses to play.

Whether it’s been force-fed or not, James content is being consumed in a big way. Last Thursday and Friday, when James was meeting with prospective teams in his hometown of Akron, Ohio, average page views at NBA.com were up 21%, and video streams on the site shot up 153%, according to Omniture. The league’s mobile website attracted nearly 200% more unique visitors compared to the same period last year. “We’re thrilled,” said Bryan Perez, senior vice president and general manager of NBA Digital, which oversees the league’s TV channel and websites.

ESPN’s flood-the-zone coverage of James has been even more comprehensive than its suffocating reporting of Brett Favre’s will-he-or-won’t-he retirement plans last year. When they’re not appearing on TV or filing online reports, ESPN’s NBA reporters have been feverishly posting kernels of information on Twitter — Marc Stein and Ric Bucher, two of ESPN’s phalanx of NBA correspondents, put up a combined 30 Twitter updates just on Saturday and Sunday morning.

They’re hardly alone, of course, and it’s naïve at this point to feign outrage or shock about the way we create and consume news. For better or worse, we live during an era when “search engine optimization” and “unique visitors” are the manna for media outlets, and anything that can drive eyeballs is worth posting on the Internet. (Full disclosure: I write for FanHouse, AOL’s sports portal, which has been as aggressive — and as accurate — as anyone in covering the James sweepstakes, and I appeared on ESPN last week to discuss James’ future.)

To be fair, a confluence of stars has aligned to increase the hype and hysteria surrounding the James story: 1) The involvement of two teams in the frenzied New York media market; 2) the ascendance of Twitter, on which reporters can post nuggets and innuendo that might have gone unpublished in an earlier era, and where many NBA players — including James’ fellow free agents, Amare Stoudemire, Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh — have been posting their thoughts on his decision; and 3) late June to early July is a relatively fallow period for sports news, even in a World Cup year. Baseball is the only major U.S. sport that’s in season, and training camps for pro and college football are still a few weeks away.

But at some point quality must trump quantity, right? The irony about our media age is that so many “scoops” are arguably less valuable than ever. The second a story is posted, competitors can rewrite the information, repackage it as their own content, and attract tons of traffic without doing much of the heavy journalistic lifting. The Internet has liberated reporters from print deadlines, but it has created an even more intense appetite — and need — for constant content, no matter how trivial or trustworthy. As a result, any bit of semi-newsy information is worth throwing to the masses, especially on a hot story like James.

Last Monday, longtime reporter and current Fox Sports radio host Stephen A. Smith guaranteed that James, Wade and Bosh would be signing with Miami, citing unnamed experts. On Friday night, Smith backed down, writing on his website that the Miami scenario is merely “possible” rather than a fait accompli.

On Saturday night, reporters descended upon a Manhattan theater to get a quote from Stoudemire, the free-agent power forward who may join James on a new team. Two reporters even sneaked into the theater for more information — and were ultimately chased out by police.

The New York Daily News, which has created a special website, GetLebron.com, to aggregate all James-related news, got Stoudemire to drop the following tidbits: that he likes New York, that he’s discussed the idea of getting other notable players to play with him in New York and that it “would be great” to play with LeBron in Gotham.

Stoudemire’s “bombshell” — as the Daily News called it — was soon requoted and repackaged by dozens of other outlets.

The end may be in sight, however. James is expected to announce his decision before his summer basketball camp begins this month in San Diego. Or so I heard.

calendar@latimes.com