The moderators of the 4000-plus-member r/zachlowe subreddit are under a misconception of what Lowe’s current job entails. “Zach Lowe is an NBA writer for the Ringer,” the description for the community reads. “He also hosts a podcast called The Zach Lowe Show, and tweets about the NBA.”
Though Lowe’s insightful writing for Sports Illustrated, Grantland, and ESPN has guided sane basketball discourse for over a decade, he is not in fact an NBA writer for The Ringer, nor has he ever been. His entire archive there consists of episodes of his video podcast (which is titled correctly in the Reddit description). While many other contributors to The Ringer have separate tabs in their archive for pods and pieces, Lowe’s lists only podcasts and videos.
Per the best available Lowe writing archive – ESPN, where he wrote most recently, doesn’t grant their writers the courtesy of a contributor page – he hasn’t written an article in a little over a year. Writers dropping the pen to talk into a microphone or camera is a long tradition, but almost always a loss to their readers.
In 2016, Slate deemed Zach Lowe “America’s best sportswriter.” Less than a decade after that pronouncement, and barring Lowe’s return to writing, the categorization of “sportswriter” no longer applies.
Will it ever again? As previously reported by Front Office Sports, Lowe’s role with The Ringer is not exclusive, allowing for a simultaneous TV gig. It’s possible that Lowe is reserving his writing to make himself a more attractive hire for another outlet down the line, in which case this could just be a temporary break from the keyboard.
The days of Zach Lowe as a full-time sportswriter, though, seem unlikely to return.
The writing was probably on the wall when Grantland, a boutique outlet famous for letting its writers stretch their wings, folded in late 2015. Lowe rose to prominence there writing the sharpest, most in-depth basketball analysis on the Internet.
And he wasn’t a one-trick pony – he wrote movingly about fandom, conducted interviews, and had a sillier side. Lowe still links to his Grantland archive in his Twitter bio nearly a decade later; presumably he agrees that it has legs.
Zach Lowe next went to ESPN, under which Grantland had operated. In 2021, ESPN put Lowe’s articles behind their ESPN+ paywall. Then, in late 2023, Lowe announced a tweak to the format of his recurring column, “10 Things I Like And Don’t Like.” The lead item would be longer, and the list of things would no longer reach 10. In the context of the sportswriting industry’s continued decay, even when it comes to the most beloved scribes – think of Peter King’s NBC boss suggesting he reduce the length of his popular column shortly before his retirement – it wasn’t a good omen.
In September 2024, ESPN laid Lowe off. The news stunned at the time; this was Zach Lowe, the basketball analyst with the closest thing to a unanimous approval rating. But ESPN had made clear with their editorial decisions that they now defined themselves more by hot-take-spouting TV personalities than dedicated, insightful writers since the end of Grantland. He had hosted the Lowe Post podcast under ESPN for years, broken some news, and done TV work at the four-letter; perhaps Lowe didn’t scream enough or expressed a resistance to wearing sleeveless tops. After that initial shock when The Athletic’s Andrew Marchand broke the news, ESPN’s choice began to feel, depressingly, in-character.
In late March, to much rejoicing, Zach Lowe joined The Ringer, which a collection of former Grantlanders founded in 2016 and where many continue to work. The band was back together! But when Lowe was hired at The Ringer, founder Bill Simmons declared “writing TBD.”
It was a shockingly casual statement about such a beloved writer’s, well, writing. Now that four months and one complete NBA playoffs have gone by since Lowe’s hire there, those two words feel more ominous.
(I reached out to Lowe and Simmons for this article, curious about how Lowe was liking his podcast-only gig and if Simmons could shed any light on The Ringer’s editorial strategy. Neither responded.)
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, though. Simmons himself, a man made famous by his columns, claims his fingers no longer work. You could count the number of articles he’s written in the nine years since The Ringer’s launch on those dysfunctional digits. Spotify bought The Ringer in 2020, and already more podcast-focused than Grantland was, the site seemed to further prioritize pods after that. The traits of Grantland that it retained have slowly melted away. The Ringer employs dozens of spectacular writers, but its written coverage concerns a narrower range of topics.
The former Grantland editors who teamed up with Simmons to launch The Ringer are now primarily known as Internet personalities and podcast hosts. The home page, following a remodeling earlier this year, resembles the Spotify app more than a traditional website.
Their reasons for this aren’t particularly difficult to discern. Print, even online, is not exactly a burgeoning industry. The Ringer has largely pivoted from it, and done so successfully. Of Time’s recent list of the “100 best podcasts of all time,” seven bear The Ringer’s flag. Pods like Binge Mode, defunct for years now, remain adored. Amy Poehler began hosting a Ringer podcast in March, in arguably the 2025 coup of the mediaverse. (Poehler’s Good Hang, in its four-month lifespan, beat out a number of renowned, long-running pods to make Time’s list.) Hell, The Ringer’s proof of concept is how long it’s lasted – nine years and counting.
That doesn’t mean the site is running perfectly, however. While The Ringer hired four new staffers in October (referred to as “voices,” notably, in the press release) as well as bringing on Lowe and Poehler in 2025, they also suffered their first round of layoffs. The Ringer Union has also struggled against management for sufficient pay and AI protections.
Then there’s the reader experience, which can prove frustrating should you try to navigate the archives. Say you’d like to read an article by Bryan Curtis, once a staff writer at Grantland and now editor-at-large at The Ringer, as well as the host of The Press Box podcast.
Curtis is a fantastic media critic and accomplished writer. His archive first confronts you with four large thumbnails from the most recent Press Box episodes. You scroll underneath those, where three video thumbnails are waiting for you. Below that are three article thumbnails. If you just want Bryan Curtis’ articles, nothing else, scroll further still to a menu of tabs, and click on “Articles.” You click on the first result, sure you’ve hit paydirt, a 1-minute read about the Chiefs winning the Super Bowl… but it’s a summary of a podcast on which Curtis appears. Same goes for the next thumbnail on the article tab. Underneath that is a bona fide Bryan Curtis article.
In the context of Lowe, then, did The Ringer even want his writing? In September last year, Fennessey, Head Of Content at The Ringer, tweeted, “the person I want to read right now is @ZachLowe_NBA.”
The person I want to read right now is @ZachLowe_NBA.
— Sean Fennessey (@SeanFennessey) September 28, 2024
Lowe now works for Fennessey’s site, but you still can’t read him.
How Zach Lowe is presented in his video pod – and really, as freelance writer Eva Holland observed, a video podcast is a vlog – also leaves room for improvement. Lowe’s and guests’ faces, replete with the most provocative expression from a given episode, are splashed over the thumbnails of episodes alongside basketball graphics. While this technique has proven effective elsewhere countless times, using provocative thumbnails for Lowe and his reputation for being the most thoughtful basketball observer going feels misguided. Then there are the FanDuel ad reads, hardly avoidable in this creative economy but enduringly unbefitting for journalists.
the greatest sportswriter of our generation has been reduced to youtube thumbnail soyface pic.twitter.com/XPel1W88RV
— Owen Phillips (@owenlhjphillips) May 22, 2025
If you miss Lowe’s writing, his archive remains available. The articles hold up. To me, Lowe’s podcasting is not an absolute substitute for his writing. Articles demand more thoughtfully phrased prose and more precisely shaped narratives. The quality of a story’s delivery is not contingent on what guest happens to be on the podcast that day.
Writing is harder than talking into a microphone with a friend; countless writers have grown tired of it, and maybe Zach Lowe is too – in which case there’s no one to blame, just cause to be sad. Let’s hope the break from sportswriting is only temporary.
Owen Lewis is a freelance sportswriter with bylines at Defector, The Guardian, and The Second Serve.
