journalism Page 17 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights

Bill Simmons On ESPN: "Who Would Work There That You Respect Right Now?" (UPDATE)
A year after learning on Twitter that ESPN fired him, Bill Simmons is clearly still bitter. “They’ve now gotten rid of everybody who is a little off the beaten path,” he says in a Hollywood Reporter cover story. “Ask yourself this: ‘Who would work there that you respect right now?’”...

UFC Restores Ariel Helwani's Credentials
MMAFighting.com reporter Ariel Helwani and his colleagues Casey Leydon and Esther Lin, who were thrown out of UFC 199 on Saturday night and banned for life after Helwani (accurately) reported that Brock Lesnar was in talks to fight at UFC 200 next month, appear to have had their credentials restored...

Blackballed MMA Reporter Admits He Was UFC's Paid Shill
MMAFighting.com’s Ariel Helwani and his colleagues Casey Leydon and Esther Lin were booted from UFC 199 on Saturday and banned from future UFC events, apparently in retaliation for Helwani having reported, a few hours before the UFC’s official announcement, that Brock Lesnar was in talks to fight at...

Apparently, The Miami Marlins Broke The News Of Muhammad Ali's Death
Two hours before Muhammad Ali’s death was announced to the world by his family, news that Ali had died was broken by none other than the Miami Marlins. No, seriously, I think. ...


Other Than HBO, Has Anyone Invested In Bill Simmons And His New Blog?
The Ringer—Bill Simmons’s self-described “content media site”—launched this morning, and immediately felt familiar. It looked like all the other digital media sites built on Medium, splashed with The Ringer’s inimitable and garish electric green color scheme, and was mostly seeded with the stories T...

SB Nation Releases Report On How Daniel Holtzclaw Story Was Published
In February, SB Nation published “Who Is Daniel Holtzclaw?,” a lengthy profile of a college football player turned cop turned convicted serial rapist. The story, by freelancer Jeff Arnold and edited by Glenn Stout, was so roundly criticized for showing one-sided sympathy to Holtzclaw that it was del...

<i>All Takes Matter</i> Signs Blogger To Join Colin Cowherd And Jason Whitlock
Jason McIntyre, founder and editor-in-chief of the blog The Big Lead, has officially signed on to join Colin Cowherd, a rat wearing a human suit, and Jason Whitlock on their upcoming Fox Sports 1 show, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the negotiations. The hour-long “discussion and op...

ESPN Finds New Way To Have Inane Debate Over Sports Analytics
It would be soul-crushing to read let alone write about every dogshit-stupid thing ESPN does, but this one has gone through the ESPN car wash, providing for ample discussion across the company’s platforms, so here we are....

ESPN's Vision Of Its Future Is Good For Sports Fans, For Now
ESPN kicked off its annual upfront presentation for advertisers Tuesday morning with a live, original performance from two of the stars of the Broadway hit musical Hamilton. This was a hokey way for ESPN to glom onto something popular and impress the easily-impressed media buyers in the audience; it...

<i>Post</i> Columnist Claims Nats GM Mike Rizzo Is Worth $450 Goddamn Million, Is Wrong
Bad tweet incoming:...

Fox Sports’s Trashman-In-Chief Portrayed As Visionary In Gushing <i>New York Times</i> Profile
Last April, the New York Times’s Richard Sandomir wrote a soft-focus puff piece on Jason Whitlock and his then-role as head of ESPN’s The Undefeated. A month later ESPN president John Skipper told Sandomir exclusively that Bill Simmons wasn’t returning to ESPN, news Simmons himself found out from Tw...

Carlos Gomez Calls Out Columnist For Quoting Him Poorly
On Wednesday, the Houston Chronicle’s Brian T. Smith wrote a column about Astros outfielder Carlos Gomez’s slow start to the season. Aside from curiously singling out Gomez—rather than, say, the struggling pitching staff (Ken Giles has a 9.26 ERA!)—as a big reason the Astros are stumbling early in t...

Column Calls For Return Of Racist Braves Mascot, Is Promptly Deleted
Bill Shanks’ column in the Macon Telegraph on why the Atlanta Braves should bring back their old mascot Chief Noc-A-Homa—a caricature of an Native American chief with a name that appears to be a baseball pun mashed together with what someone thought sounded like an “Indian name”—begins thusly:...

Reporter Who Asked Draymond Green That Odd Question About The Houston Floods Gets Fired
After the Warriors beat the Rockets in Game 4 on Sunday, a reporter started to ask Draymond Green a strange question about the connection between the floods in Houston and his team’s performance when Green stopped him and went off on the guy for over a minute. Green said that the reporter had tried ...

Source: Skip Bayless Is Leaving ESPN For Fox Sports
ESPN provocateur-in-chief and First Take co-host Skip Bayless is leaving ESPN, according to a statement released today by the company:...

ESPN Fires Curt Schilling, Who Finally Became Too Much Of An Embarrassment
ESPN fired baseball analyst Curt Schilling tonight, two days after he shared an anti-trans meme on Facebook. “ESPN is an inclusive company. Curt Schilling has been advised that his conduct was unacceptable and his employment with ESPN has been terminated,” said ESPN in a statement....

Spring Game Coverage Is The Saddest College Football Coverage
Most major college football programs run through a goofball annual rite in which they hold a scrimmage that counts for jack shit and yet warrants its own title. At the spring game, the intrasquad “teams,” usually named with all the imagination you’d apply to ordering a sweatshirt, play under almost ...

ESPN Asks How Kobe Bryant Being Credibly Accused Of Rape Affected Kobe Bryant
When a sports event becomes so big that it produces a flood of coverage, as Kobe Bryant’s season-long goodbye tour has, it’s easy for pundits and reporters to end up in awkward positions simply by virtue of having had to say so much for so long about one thing....

Minor League Soccer Team Has Minor League Media Operation
The Charleston Battery are a soccer team that play in the United Soccer League—the third tier of American soccer, below MLS and the NASL—and average about 4,000 fans a game. You would think they’d be happy with any media coverage they could get, especially from South Carolina’s most-read newspaper. ...