ESPN was able to use the collapse of The Washington Post sports department to beef up its own oft-scrutinized journalism efforts.
ESPN announced Monday that it has hired six former writers for The Washington Post — Kent Babb, Kareem Copeland, Chuck Culpepper, Robert Klemko, Tom Schad and Ben Strauss — to join its Investigative, Enterprise and Digital Journalism Unit. The hires come weeks after The Athletic (owned by The New York Times) hired six other former Post writers.
Babb, Culpepper and Schad will cover all sports for ESPN, Klemko will focus specifically on crime and scandals, Strauss will continue covering the sports media beat, and Copeland will cover women’s college basketball and the WNBA. The hires are just the latest reverberation from The Washington Post deciding to shutter its sports department last month as part of widespread layoffs.
ESPN has in recent months faced questions about its commitment to sports journalism after its largest business partner, the NFL, reached a deal to acquire a minority stake in the network. That deal, which also granted ESPN ownership of NFL Network and other NFL Media assets, was initially announced last summer and approved by regulators last month.
After the deal was announced last year, ESPN president Jimmy Pitaro repeatedly stressed that the NFL ownership stake would not have any impact on the network’s journalistic efforts. While that still remains to be seen, the hiring of six prominent writers would seem to be a clear statement that the network is not immediately scaling back.
In a statement released Monday, Pitaro touted ESPN’s “robust commitment to journalism” as “core to our mission of serving sports fans.”
Concerns about ESPN’s commitment to journalism predate the NFL deal. Pitaro arrived at ESPN in 2018 with the mandate of improving the network’s relationship with the league, an effort that has been wildly successful — from its acquisition of NFL Network to its addition to the Super Bowl rotation.
Coincidentally or not, the Pitaro era has also seen the network’s most visible journalistic effort, the long-running “Outside the Lines,” steadily phased out. And while ESPN has continued to break and report negative stories about its business partners, those stories have not seemed to have the same kind of impact on the network’s relationship with the league as in the late years of the John Skipper era, when the NFL’s discontent with ESPN was at its peak and the network’s journalism was the main point of contention.
It is entirely possible that the NFL will not be the only league to have an ownership stake in ESPN. Disney began pursuing ‘strategic partners’ for ESPN — including additional sports leagues and the big tech companies — about three years ago, but the NFL talks were the only ones to advance past the point of speculation. Pitaro said last year that ESPN is open to similar deals with other leagues: “If there’s an opportunity with another league that we think it makes good business sense for us and also is beneficial for the sports fan, we’re of course going to pursue it.”
