This originally appeared in Tuesday morning’s edition of The A Block, Awful Announcing’s daily newsletter with the latest sports media news, commentary, and analysis. Sign up here and be the first to know everything going on in the sports media world.
The sports media industry has spent the better part of a decade dismantling the institutions that made investigative journalism possible. The Washington Post gutted its sports desk. HBO shut down Real Sports. Newsrooms that once employed teams of accountability reporters now run skeleton operations producing wire copy. The infrastructure for doing hard, slow, expensive journalism about powerful sports institutions has been collapsing in slow motion, and nobody has rushed to fill the void.
Nobody, that is, except ESPN.
ESPN spent about a decade performing the slow-motion mercy killing of Outside the Lines while insisting it was doing the opposite. In 2013, the network moved the daily show from ESPN to ESPN2 — cutting its viewership nearly in half overnight, from 336,000 viewers to 160,000 in a single week — to make room for Colin’s New Football Show (remember that?) In 2019, with Bob Ley retired and the daily show drawing its last breaths, they killed the weekday edition entirely and spun a Saturday morning replacement as an “expansion,” with executive vice president Norby Williamson claiming the show would now “impact more people.” It was, as we put it at the time, a less effective spin cycle than one from a washing machine. By February 2023, when the standalone Saturday show was put down for good after Super Bowl LVII, there was nothing left to spin. The network said the OTL brand would live on in SportsCenter segments. That’s the sports media equivalent of telling someone their dog didn’t die, it just went to live on a farm, somewhere deep inside a noon SportsCenter rundown.
HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel followed in December of that same year, signing off after 29 seasons as the last true investigative magazine show in sports television. The outlet that exposed child slavery in the UAE, documented the NFL’s concussion cover-up, and held the IOC accountable for decades was gone because the appetite for that kind of journalism — at least on traditional television — had evaporated. In his final sign-off, Gumbel said the work was never done. He wasn’t wrong, and the void left behind was enormous.
That’s the context for what ESPN did Monday. The network hired six former Washington Post reporters — Kent Babb, Kareem Copeland, Chuck Culpepper, Robert Klemko, Tom Schad, and Ben Strauss — to join its newsgathering, investigative, and enterprise teams. The hiring comes five weeks after Jeff Bezos gutted the Post’s sports section, effectively shutting down one of the most storied sports journalism operations in the country. Klemko, a member of the Post‘s 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winning team, who was not part of the Post‘s layoffs, will focus on sports-related crime and major scandals. Schad covered the Dan Snyder era of the Commanders and will handle data journalism. Strauss was the Post’s sports media and business reporter, bringing those chops directly into the ESPN beat that will matter most to readers of this newsletter.
Over the past year, ESPN has been quietly making the most significant investment in investigative journalism in its post-OTL era. Dan Wetzel — a New York Times bestselling author and one of the most accomplished college sports scandal reporters of the past two decades — joined the network as a senior writer in March 2025, ending a 22-year run at Yahoo Sports. Wetzel spent years breaking stories on the Jerry Sandusky scandal, the Aaron Hernandez case, and NCAA corruption that others wouldn’t touch, and ESPN hired him specifically to do investigative reporting across multiple platforms.
The most concrete answer to the skeptics who say ESPN can’t actually do independent journalism is Don Van Natta Jr. and Kalyn Kahler, and what they built around the NFLPA story this past summer. It started in May, when ESPN reported that the FBI had opened an investigation into the union’s financial dealings with OneTeam Partners, a multibillion-dollar group licensing firm. That report directly triggered the union to hire outside counsel to review Lloyd Howell’s activities as executive director. Then Van Natta and Kahler confirmed not only that an arbitration ruling on NFL owner collusion existed — first unearthed by Pablo Torre Finds Out in late June — but also that Howell had secretly agreed with the NFL to hide its contents from the very players he was supposed to represent.
What followed was a run of exclusive reporting that became a case study in what ESPN’s investigative unit can achieve when operating at its peak. Kahler — who had joined ESPN from The Athletic in July 2024 — broke with Van Natta that Howell had charged the union $2,426 at Atlanta’s Magic City strip club during the annual NFLPA summit, listing the purpose of the outing as a “Player Engagement Event to support & grow our Union,” complete with two VIP rooms and a car service tab submitted to the union by an employee on Howell’s instructions. On the same day the story was published, two executive committee members were still on record giving Howell a ringing endorsement. He resigned hours later.
That is accountability journalism. And when Dan Patrick questioned on his radio show whether ESPN could cover the NFL independently, given its equity stake in the league, Van Natta responded accordingly on social media.
“The journalist in me…”
“I don’t know how deep ESPN went on the mess at the NFLPA. I know Florio did, a couple of people did…”
Imagine saying “the journalist in me” and then failing Journalism 101:https://t.co/aFBs5TEJTq
— Don Van Natta Jr. (@DVNJr) August 7, 2025
Patrick’s underlying question, though, deserved more than a social media clapback. And Van Natta himself has acknowledged as much. When he spoke with Puck’s John Ourand about the ESPN-NFL equity arrangement, he admitted the conflict concerns him, said he’d been given assurances that nothing would change, and noted he was deep into an NFL investigative project that he expected to be published the same way it would have been before the deal closed.
The space ESPN is trying to fill didn’t just open up when OTL died or when the Washington Post gutted its sports desk. It cracked open when Pablo Torre left ESPN a few years ago, launching Pablo Torre Finds Out at Meadowlark Media, a podcast that has become the closest thing to Real Sports currently available. Torre brought down NFLPA leadership, broke the Kawhi Leonard salary cap circumvention story, and documented the Jordon Hudson-Bill Belichick relationship in ways that made him the most consequential investigative sports journalist working right now. His whole show was built on the premise that the infrastructure for this kind of reporting no longer existed at big media companies, that you had to do it independently, with an entertainment wrapper that made the audience care.
He proved the demand was there. ESPN watched and took notes.
The question isn’t whether ESPN can attract journalists. Monday proved they can. The question is what happens when the investigative unit produces something the NFL doesn’t want published, or something that threatens a league partner’s business interests. Bob Ley used to be the answer to that question. Outside the Lines at its best was proof that the E in ESPN didn’t have to stand for entertainment all the way down.
Jimmy Pitaro’s journalists will have to be that proof now. And the sports media world — including Pablo Torre Finds Out, which has been filling this gap more than anyone — will be watching to see if ESPN actually means it this time.
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