The medium may be the message, but not everything in a medium provides the message you might naturally expect. Some highly-impactful works across mediums have been ones that reference and play with format and genre conventions. Pablo Torre brought that up Sunday in his Pablo Torre Finds Out free newsletter, discussing why he and that Meadowlark Media show dove into UNC football coach Bill Belichick’s relationship with Jordon Hudson this week, and why they did so the way they did. Here’s that episode for reference:
In his newsletter about this week’s show, Torre addressed those two issues, and the feedback he’s received on each. To start with, there’s the “you’re better than that” criticism the show has received for spending its time looking into what’s seemingly a story about a coach’s personal dating life. There, Torre defended why he felt this story was worth pursuing, with the “Investigating Belichick’s Girlfriend: The Power of Jordon Hudson, Revealed” title he chose for the show key to that:
I love taking stupid things seriously.
And that the most important question isn’t what you’re examining, but how.
My reporting started way back in February, when PTFO broke the story of how Jordon Hudson had been secretly operating as her boyfriend’s agent/momager, to the point of insinuating herself into a Super Bowl commercial — the paragon of American branding! — with a stunned Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.
And at that point, what I began to suspect is that this whole thing isn’t really a story about an age-gap relationship.
It’s a story about power.
And I started finding person after person who had to deal with both Jordon and Bill — at length, firsthand, amid this strange phase in the life of the greatest coach in football history — who agreed.
But having a worthwhile topic is only the first part of the equation. The next part is that “not what you’re examining, but how.” In this case, Torre investigated by talking with 11 sources across months, producing a remarkable range of details. That led to him building something to a magazine or digital longform piece (which he has plenty of experience with from his career with Sports Illustrated and ESPN). But he then presented his findings on the show in conversation with guest hosts Katie Nolan and Michael Cruz Kaine. And that format got a lot of notice, including from climate change reporter Matthew Zeitlin of Heatmap.News:
In the newsletter, Torre wrote that he came up with that approach (which PTFO has used for other investigations, including ones into Wayne Gretzky and Kash Patel as well as James Gandolfini and LeBron James) thanks to the popularity of unboxing videos:
The basic premise of the unboxing video is so simple that the what, most often, is literal children’s toys. But what makes the premise so darkly effective, to me, is the clear human pleasure of watching someone else react to an authentic surprise.
So I started thinking about how this lesson could now apply to the conventional precepts of journalism, in general. I got here by climbing the ladder of print magazines, starting off as a fact-checker at Sports Illustrated. And that pleasure of surprise, I realized, felt more than familiar. Because what is opening a genuinely great magazine if not unboxing a package of stories?
But the issue, here in the 2020s, is that journalism means video/audio. Not print.
Which is why my approach, while building PTFO, has instead been to build the digital evolution of a television (news magazine) show. Where we teach our staff to turn video/audio conversations into mystery boxes: full of original, serious, high-value reporting… that then gets presented to recurring Friends of PTFO — like Katie Nolan and Michael Cruz Kayne — who then get to play with the news.
That approach of combining detailed original reporting with reactions to that reporting (and both playing with and subverting some video/audio podcast expectations in the process) makes some sense. And it certainly paid dividends in this case, with the tremendous reporting here drawing tons of attention across the web, and with the full episode drawing more than 87,000 views on YouTube as of Sunday afternoon. (Some clips have further thousands of views across platforms.)
Of course, Torre is far from the first person to play with the expectations in a particular medium. Indeed, the starting quote here is a riff on Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, who did a lot of exploration on how different mediums can be tweaked. And plenty of newsmagazine shows, including HBO’s Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel (RIP) and ESPN’s Outside The Lines and E60, have often featured discussions with the reporter, host, and/or a panel around the actual reporting. But it is interesting to see that discussion centered around reactions like this, with it perhaps drawing even more attention (especially from online audiences) than a straightforward newsmagazine piece might, but with the heavy reporting lifting still underpinning it.
And it’s arguably that heavy reporting lifting that gets back to this being worthwhile. There’s been a lot of conversation about Hudson and Belichick, but a fair bit of it has been centered on just the idea of that age-gap relationship, and that’s in many ways more salacious than newsworthy.
But Torre is quite right that there is a legitimate power question here. That’s especially true around Hudson’s involvement with the UNC program (and the presumed lack of checks and balances with her, as she’s not a university employee and is not really subject to their policies, or to records law media requests). And it’s interesting that the main school pushback on Torre’s reporting was objecting to the part of the report that said they’d banned Hudson from their football facilities. (Whether they ever did or didn’t depends on who you believe, with Torre standing by his reporting, but the Tar Heels made it clear Hudson is welcomed going forward).
Torre is not the only person who’s looked at the actual power story here. But he and his show did so in a remarkably thorough way, and he then used his knowledge of the internet and its preferred formats to get that reporting in front of a lot of people. That’s interesting to see, and it’s interesting to read Torre’s explanation for why he covered this story, and why he presented it the way he did. We’ll see what he and the show dive into next.