Pablo Torre on how Sports Illustrated fact-checking job informed his career: ‘It was like taking a MRI to art’

There are many who think of Pablo Torre as a TV personality. That’s certainly a significant part of his body of work, considering his past on everything from Around The Horn to Highly Questionable to High Noon and his current Pablo Torre Finds Out video podcast with Meadowlark Media. But Torre’s print/digital journalism background at The Harvard Crimson, Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine/ESPN.com, and more is key to his video work, and he’s repeatedly said that’s key to helping him stand out in the space.

Torre most recently discussed that in an interview with Zak Keefer of The Athletic. There, he went into detail on some of his early fact-checking work for SI, which came after he initially failed the LSAT (he later passed it, but never wound up applying to law school). Here’s some of that:

He was doing two things at once: honing his journalistic chops at Sports Illustrated by going line by line through work from some of the best writers in the business: Gary Smith, S.L. Price, Tom Verducci — the “f—ing lions of literary sports journalism,” Torre calls them — and simultaneously inching his way into debate television. Whenever a network booking agent asked for someone from the magazine to fill a seat and dish on the day’s sports news, most writers shrugged. Torre jumped, credentials be damned.

…He also was climbing the ranks at the magazine. Torre’s 2009 investigation, “How (And Why) Athletes Go Broke” started as mere curiosity. He spent months reporting and writing the story on his days off, not telling anyone. After publication, it would become one of the most-read stories in SI’s online history and later the inspiration behind the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, “Broke.”

…The more he became a bona fide talking head, the more his visibility grew and his paycheck fattened, the less he picked up the phone. He used to love picking up the phone.

It went back to his first job in the business, the job that made him forget about law school. At SI, Torre was constantly calling sources, double- and triple-checking details gleaned by the likes of Smith, Price and Verducci, and offering him a glimpse into how great stories come together. “It was like taking an MRI to art,” Torre says. It’s what made him fall in love with journalism.

These comments are especially notable with Torre currently drawing intense media attention for his PTFO reporting on Bill Belichick and Jordon Hudson. Torre discusses elsewhere with Keefer how he became “radicalized by the drug of television” from some of those guest appearances, and how that’s led to a lot of what else he’s done. But he approached TV with a writing perspective (and beyond that, a fact-checking one), even pre-writing some arguments and rebuttals.

That’s a thread that’s carried through into Torre’s PTFO work. There, he often delivers the results of investigations with friends in a humorous unboxing-inspired approach (which has its gatekeeping critics). However, there’s detail-packed sourcing and reporting underpinning Torre’s investigations, which helps him to stand up to legal threats. And his fact-checking background may be part of why he’s putting so much effort into getting those details right.

It should be noted that Torre’s approach is far from the only tack to take in modern media overall, or even just within video podcasts. There’s room for a lot of different approaches, which each can hit different audiences. (For example, while The Dan Le Batard Show and PTFO are under the same Meadowlark umbrella, the Venn diagram of their audiences is far from one circle.) And as Brian Moritz noted at Sports Media Guy in his (largely positive) reaction to Torre’s “unboxing” comments, “I think all of us in journalism have spent too much time and gotten too bogged down over the past 15 years in debating delivery methods.”

But what Torre is doing is working for him, and bringing him an audience. And it’s interesting to read his comments on past work that helped inspire his approach. While Torre certainly has a lot of experience in TV and video content at this point, and is adept at using those mediums to get his points out there, there’s definitely an old-school print and fact-checking ethos running under much of what he does. And it’s notable to hear him talk about how those fact-checking days at SI contributed to that.