When people think of the golden age of journalism at ESPN, many would point to the run of Bob Ley’s Outside the Lines.
The show, which debuted in 1990 and was spearheaded by Ley until his retirement in 2019, covered countless sports stories that wouldn’t typically get airtime on a normal episode of SportsCenter, for instance. Such stories ranged from concussions and CTE in the NFL to the Larry Nassar scandal at Michigan State. At the heart of the show was investigative journalism, which is a dying breed at ESPN and in the press more generally in 2025.
Ley is now six years into his retirement, but still keeps up with what’s going on in the media. He leads the Center for Sports Media at Seton Hall University, and on Wednesday, he appeared on The Ricky Cobb Show to discuss some of his concerns about modern sports journalism.
“What concerns me? I’d like for there to be more featuring of the good journalism that I know exists, and it does exist. But it’s a race for clicks and views. The marketplace rules. And I often ask this question of students when I speak with them, when I worked at ESPN, why did we turn the lights on in the morning, unlock the doors, turn on our computers, sit down, and start?
“Why did we do all of this every day? The answers would come back, ‘to earn a living,’ yeah. ‘To send your kids through college,’ yeah. ‘To provide programming for the country,’ yeah. But the real answer, the baseline answer, is we do all of this to increase value for the shareholders of The Walt Disney Company. It’s a capitalist society, the last I checked, unless Bernie Sanders is running through the streets with the flag at the moment.
“And so, you gotta get comfortable with that. And it’s real easy for those of us in the media, especially journalists, we have this sometimes dominant ‘diva gene’ where we’ll think we’re doing the Lord’s work, and God forbid anyone encroached on our turf. We’re doing important work, but you’ve got to accept, especially now as you come into the field, that you gotta earn your keep.”
That’s a sobering answer from someone who crafted their legacy around original journalism. But Ley is right. At the end of the day, journalism is a business, just like manufacturing, or banking, or pharmaceuticals. The goal is to turn a profit. Original reporting, like what was done for decades on Outside the Lines, no longer pays the bills as it once did. Consumer preferences have shifted as the industry has grown more fragmented.
Sure, investigative journalism can still be a revenue generator. But, it’s a far riskier endeavor than producing content that’s cheaper to create, and which might draw more viewers and clicks anyway.
That’s why, from Ley’s perspective, young journalists should eliminate that “diva gene” as quickly as possible. “You gotta earn your keep,” after all. And that keeps going to be hard to earn with a holier-than-thou perspective on journalism.