Behind the scenes of my Nieman Lab prediction

For the seventh year, I was asked to be a part of the Nieman Lab’s prediction package for the coming year in journalism.

This year, I wrote about the potential looming crisis in sports journalism, as players and teams fully embrace digital and social media.

Being a part of this package is one of the favorite things I do every year. Nieman Lab’s whole pitch is “Each year, we ask some of the smartest people in journalism and media what they think is coming in the next 12 months.” To be a part of this group is really cool, and I appreciate Joshua Benton at Nieman for including me every year.

Last year, I wrote a piece that evaluated my previous Nieman Lab predictions. So let’s start off by looking at my 2023 prediction and seeing how it did.

The prediction: A major sports betting journalism scandal is coming

The same way Donald Trump’s candidacy is a test for the norms and practices of American political journalists, legalized sports gambling is a test for the norms and practices of sports journalists.

The verdict: OK, so we did not have a big scandal involving sports journalism and legal and accessible gambling. There were some scandals involving players, but in sports journalism, the Shams Charania 2023 NBA Draft story is the closest thing we have come to a real sports journalism gambling scandal. I’m not sure if this is just luck, or if the firewalls created in news organizations between their reporters and the gambling partnerships are holding, or what.

Truth be told, the “prediction” part of these essays is often a kind of MacGuffin that allows me to talk about an issue that I think is salient for sports journalism in the coming year.

I do feel like the vibes around legal and accessible gambling have shifted this year. This is 100 percent anecdotal on my part, but it feels like in the absence of a scandal, there’s a lot more negativity and a lot more “I’m not sure this was the best idea” around sports gambling. I’ve got a piece about this I’m hoping to post next week about this idea.

2024 prediction director’s cut

So here’s the key part of my prediction this year:

2025 will be the year when sports journalists start to really reckon with the fact that teams and players don’t need them anymore.

Two behind-the-curtain things from this year’s prediction.

I started thinking about this in October, when both the Nick Castellanos story that gave me my hook and the NFLPA’s request to move interviews out of the locker rooms broke.

My wife, a former newspaper editor, and I had a day-long discussion about this. I told her about it with all the righteous indignation of someone who teachers sports journalism who was aghast at the loss of the access needed to do the job. She pushed back, and we went back and forth on this for a while. She pointed out that no reporters get the kind of guaranteed access to sources that sports journalists do. Why do you get to demand to go in the locker room?

What makes sports journalists so special?

My immediate reaction was to be defensive, but it got me thinking in productive ways about this issue.

Let’s use Broadway as an example. Last week, producers announced that Swept Away¹ was closing on December 15 after being open for less than a month.

The producers of the show have not given any interviews saying why this show is closing. There wasn’t a press conference where they explained why. The actors in the show aren’t expected to answer questions from reporters immediately after the show explaining their feelings. The story got announced on social media, briefly written about on industry sites, and the world went on.

If you’re going to say that the producers should give interviews to reporters in an instance like this, well, I’m not going to disagree with you. But the fact is, they don’t. We work with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. And should is never the basis for a good business plan.

And if you’re going to say there’s an obvious difference between sports and Broadway … well, I’d like to hear it.² Because when you lay it out like my wife did, it’s hard not to see the point: What makes sports journalists so special?

Here’s my contradictory point: One thing I hope that came through in the piece is that I don’t like that journalists are losing access. I think that independent sports journalism is a vital part of the sports media ecosystem. I think at the end of the day, fans are best served by a balance of team-produced content and independent journalism. As a Bills fan, I love the Big Dubs videos and being able to watch Sean McDermott’s locker room speeches after wins. But I also want to read reporting into what happened at the end of the Rams game and why it happened.³

But we have to deal with the world that actually exists, not the one we want to exist. And reacting defensively to losing access doesn’t help us as an industry move forward.

What really broke my Nieman Lab prediction open for me was when I looked up Nick Castellanos’ career stats on Baseball Reference and Wikipedia.

I knew of Castellanos, had seen some of his big postseason home runs, and knew him from the meme. I always assumed if I, a casual baseball fan at best, knew who he was, that he was a big-time star.

And he’s not.

I mean, he’s a really good player. But I assumed he was a bigger star than he was. He’s not Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani or even Bryce Harper.

That’s when it all snapped into place for me.

Over the last 20 years, when we would talk about players bypassing traditional journalism through digital and social media, it was almost always the stars we focused on. Tiger Woods posting updates on his website in the early 2000s. Candace Parker announcing her retirement via her own Instagram account, rather than doing so through a team press conference or by telling a friendly reporter. Simone Biles doing Get Ready With Me videos on TikTok.

But if guys like Nick Castellanos are realizing that they don’t need independent sports media anymore, that they can they insist on editorial control or just publish their own stories to their own accounts and actually do it, that really shows where we’re at.

Sports and sports media have always had a symbiotic relationship. That relationship is what’s changing.

It’s been brewing for a long time. I wrote about sports journalism without access in my dissertation 10 years ago.

It’s one thing when it’s Tiger Woods or Kevin Durant.

But when it’s Nick Castellanos, it’s clear that the symbiotic relationship between sports and sports media is irrevocably changed.

1. Look, it’s a musical featuring songs by the Avett Brothers, so this is very clearly at the center of my personal Venn Diagram. But this show deserves a longer run. It was a powerful show with incredible production design and some incredible performances. Adrian Blake Enscoe is going to be a star - that man is delightful and he is remarkable in this show. Anyway, late Tuesday night, the show announced a two-week extension. If you can see it before Dec. 29, HIGHLY recommend.

2. For real. Comment below. I’d genuinely like to hear it.

3. The essential truth in

Tyler Dunne

series on McDermott last year is that the coach tends to turtle in late-game scenarios, and boy did that happen in the Rams game. Also, it’s worth noting that in the past two years, McDermott’s teams have lost in part because it didn’t have the right number of players on the field for game-ending special team’s play.