An excerpt:
No matter your NBA allegiance or your views on player empowerment, the situation highlighted just how fundamentally unique the NBA transaction game has become. And that while Silver may decry the state of affairs when stars like Lillard make things ugly with their teams despite lengthy contracts on the books, the media is just as enveloped in the whole process as players, teams or agents.
Let’s go back to the previous two inflection points. When James left Cleveland for South Beach, he blew the top off of how player movement worked in the NBA. Suddenly, any destination and any price was on the table. His return to Cleveland four years later featured a secret Sports Illustrated Op-Ed and fans tracking airplanes. When James went to the Lakers four years after that, many in NBA media considered it an open secret for a year-plus beforehand.
When Wojnarowski arrived at ESPN, the network’s approach to coverage of its partner in the NBA changed completely. Gone was the data visualization, longform storytelling and innovative audio of TrueHoop and ESPN The Magazine. In was the age of the insider. Outlets including The Athletic (with Shams Charania), Turner (with Chris Haynes) and even the New York Times (with Marc Stein) followed suit. Wojnarowski now reportedly makes between $7-$10 million per year at ESPN.
When you combine those two forces you arrive at a crossroads where inevitably insiders are part of the stories they report on.
A league partner (ESPN) pays its primary reporter on the league (Woj) a whopping 8 figures to, effectively, be the primary source of information about a saga (the Lillard sweepstakes) that can be shucked for content all summer long. It is invariably in that reporter’s best interest to control the information flow directly. That way, their TV hits and paywalled articles and social media posts are worth that much more.
As Jesse Pantuosco wrote for Awful Announcing this summer, “Wojnarowski is more a politician than a journalist, making inroads with league power-brokers by any means necessary.” If a reporter’s primary value to his employer is to be first on a story, why should that reporter not be selective with kernels of news that might give other reporters a lead, or cause someone involved in the story to act differently?
how is that some revelation by Woj
