Oren Weisfeld (right, courtesy of Oren Weisfeld) Oren Weisfeld (right, courtesy of Oren Weisfeld)
By Michael Grant on

Sports journalism has never been more challenging. With diminishing access, the rise of social media, and the rise of in-house content, thorough reporting on teams and players has suffered. It also doesn’t help that traditional media outlets spend less on journalism than they used to, and that trust in the media is at an all-time low.

Oren Weisfeld, a freelance journalist and author, wrote an article for Poynter titled “Welcome to the post-journalism era of professional sports.” Many of his points about sports journalism resonated with media members. We recently caught up with Weisfeld to discuss his story.

Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

What do you think of the response to your story?

Oren Weisfeld: “The reaction has surprised me a bit, especially how many people in the sports world, and especially journalists, it resonated with. I’ve been a freelancer for a long time, and you never know when stories are going to blow up and when they’re not going anywhere. I posted this one on Twitter, and all of a sudden it had 50,000 views and was shared by a lot of journalists. I think they feel a lot of the same frustration that I dug into in the piece. Honestly, it’s been nice to see that many people, so it doesn’t feel like I’m screaming into a void. It feels like it’s a hot topic right now and one that a lot of people can relate to.”

Was there a personal story behind your decision to write this?

“The story definitely comes from my personal frustrations, specifically in my home market of Toronto and in working with Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, which is the parent company of the Toronto Raptors and the Toronto Maple Leafs. They’re known as one of the stricter PR teams in professional sports for how they protect their players and restrict journalists’ access. So, the story is definitely born of my frustration as a journalist with the many hoops I would have to jump through each time I requested access, especially as a freelance journalist. It only added to the number of hoops, especially in the NBA. But I will also say that as I went on in my journalism career, I learned that Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment is not unique and that there are many teams across professional sports who are guilty of restricting access in similar ways.”

What should be done?

“In my opinion, it’s the league’s responsibility to hold its teams accountable for what’s clearly written in, for example, the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement. The teams are kind of run amok, and they’re all doing their own things. They’ve all taken different approaches to how they dole out access, and there’s no consistency or transparency.

“My whole career has been a series of jumping through hoops to try to get five minutes with a PR person standing over my shoulder while I try to get an athlete to open up to me, all the while I’m hearing stories from older journalists about the golden age of access, the relationships they built with athletes, and never feeling like I ever had a chance to do anything.”

Which league does the best job of providing access?

“I would say the league with the best access is still Major League Baseball. There’s a lot more time when players are walking around pregame and available. If they are willing to talk, you can at least request it. You can go up to them and say, ‘Hey, can I ask you a few questions?’ So baseball is definitely the most open. But all of them are trending in this direction. And I think what I hit on in the piece is that the increase in in-house content is making a lot of players say, ‘Well, why do I need to talk to journalists if I can get my message across this way?’”

We know why the media cares, but why should fans?

“I think there are a number of reasons. One of them is that when we’re talking about in-house content, whether that means a team’s social media person, a player producing a documentary, or a player doing a podcast after a game, these are all good things that should exist in addition to mainstream media or mainstream journalism. But I think the problem comes when they take over and become the only thing fans are seeing. I would argue that the vast majority of what fans are seeing is now in-house content.”

Why is that a problem?

“The problem is that they are not necessarily being asked the tough questions. They’re not being asked the things fans want to know in many cases. I think the role of the journalist is to hold athletes accountable and essentially serve as a middleman between fans and athletes, getting the information fans want from them.

“And when you talk about in-house content, that’s not necessarily going to be the case, because in a lot of cases it’s not going to be stuff that looks good, or it’s not always going to reflect well on the athlete. The in-house content just wouldn’t ask those questions. They’d just stay away from it because that’s not what they’re there for. They’re not journalists. They haven’t been trained to ask those kinds of questions, to research, and to do the homework.”

What is an example of that?

“I think a good example is Pablo Torre’s reporting with the Los Angeles Clippers. You wonder why a beat reporter didn’t break that news, right? A beat reporter theoretically has the most access, the most sources, and all of that stuff. But they weren’t able to break news about something that any Clippers fan would want to know, or any NBA fan would want to know about what’s going on behind the scenes in terms of Kawhi Leonard’s free agency or Kawhi’s contract and the kind of dark money behind it. That’s the kind of thing in-house content will never even try to get to the bottom of. When we’re kind of pushing out journalism in favor of the in-house content, we’re going to miss stories like that.”

How much has the rise of social media played a role in all this?

“(Former NBA player) Danny Green, whom I spoke to for the story, talked about the rise of cell phone cameras throughout his time in the league. Now that there are so many cameras recording everything a player does in the locker room and outside of it, players are naturally less inclined to give vulnerable answers because they know that anything they say is being recorded and can be chopped up, aggregated, and misrepresented online, often not by the journalist who took the video but by a bad-faith actor who knows that if they clip a certain part of it, it’s going to get a lot of clicks and go viral. As a result, players have become increasingly timid about speaking, and I totally understand where the players are coming from.”

How would you convince the leagues to increase access?

“It’s very hard because the leagues don’t need journalists to the same extent they used to in order to be profitable. … My only sell to the leagues would be that replacing journalism with in-house content risks jeopardizing the connection fans are building with players and teams. If there is no real journalism, there’s a risk that fans will no longer be able to connect with the human parts of these athletes and the more humanizing parts of these journeys.”

Is there a happy ending in sight, or is this the new reality?

“It’s going to take a concerted effort from the players, the teams, the leagues, and the journalists to work together to find solutions. Right now, it’s trending in a dangerous direction, where access journalism is seen as something you shouldn’t even try to approach as a new journalist because it’s so hard to break into.”

“If there are no more Wright Thompsons, if there are no more of these great profile writers who have developed great access and can get to what makes an athlete tick or the human side of an athlete, if we just stop getting that altogether because the new journalists aren’t let in the door, then fans are really going to miss out on all of that stuff we’ve been talking about.”

About Michael Grant

Born in Jamaica. Grew up in New York City. Lives in Louisville, Ky. Sports writer. Not related to Ulysses S. Grant.

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