Five weeks after the Washington Post effectively shut down its sports section and laid off nearly its entire sports staff, ESPN announced Monday that it had hired six of the paper’s former reporters.
Kent Babb, Kareem Copeland, Chuck Culpepper, Robert Klemko, Tom Schad, and Ben Strauss will join the Worldwide Leader’s newsgathering, investigative, and enterprise teams, as industry leaders continue to capitalize on Jeff Bezos’s decision to gut one of the most storied institutions in sports media.
Babb spent years as a features and enterprise writer whose work has appeared in multiple editions of “The Year’s Best Sportswriting.” Copeland covered the WNBA, NBA, college basketball, the Commanders, and the Olympics, and will now be based in the Midwest, covering women’s college basketball and the WNBA for ESPN. Culpepper brings decades of experience covering everything from college sports to World Cups.
Klemko, the lone reporter among ESPN’s new hires who wasn’t part of WaPo‘s layoffs and a member of the paper’s 2024 Pulitzer Prize–winning team, will join the network’s investigative unit focusing on sports-related crime, major scandals, and other enterprise reporting. Schad covered the Commanders through the Dan Snyder era as their beat reporter and will handle enterprise, investigative, and data journalism. Strauss was the Post‘s sports media and business reporter and will focus on sports business enterprise and investigative work at ESPN.
“Adding these six outstanding journalists and the reputation of The Washington Post will enhance an ESPN team that is already the best in the business,” ESPN chairman Jimmy Pitaro said in a statement. “We are proud to advance our robust commitment to journalism, which is core to our mission of serving sports fans. Today’s news strengthens our position as the place to turn for the latest and most in-depth sports news, reporting, and feature stories across every platform.”
In addition to ESPN, The Athletic also hired six former Post staffers, including longtime columnist Barry Svrluga and investigative reporter Adam Kilgore. Prior to that, the Baltimore Banner expanded into DC sports coverage immediately after the Post layoffs, announcing it would cover the Commanders and Nationals day-to-day while also handling enterprise reporting on the Capitals, Wizards, and Maryland Terrapins. The Banner registered dcbanner.com and thedcbanner.com domain names and has already hired at least one former Post staffer, with editor-in-chief Audrey Cooper telling Status the outlet is talking to many more laid-off Post journalists about potential roles.
What remains at the Post is essentially a skeleton operation, producing a handful of pages of wire copy while sports coverage is reframed internally as more of a cultural and societal beat than a traditional reporting desk.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.