In the fall of 2013, Joel Anderson arrived at BuzzFeed with a plan. He was going to be a senior sports writer. He was also going to learn how to make GIFs, because this was BuzzFeed, and the currency of the moment was digital fluency. Both things seemed important. Both things seemed possible.
Within six months, the sports vertical was gone.
Anderson ended up under BuzzFeed’s investigative editor, part of the early architecture of what would become the national desk, doing work that had nothing to do with what he’d imagined when he took the job. And then, sometime in the months that followed, Ben Smith — the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, a man whose middle name might as well have been Scoops — walked up to Anderson and asked him a question that, in retrospect, said everything about where sports media was already heading.
“Do you know Woj?”
Anderson did. Not personally, but he knew who Adrian Wojnarowski was. Everyone in sports media knew who Wojnarowski was by then. He was the Yahoo Sports NBA reporter whose Twitter feed had become the most valuable real estate in sports media, a man who could end a news cycle and start a new one in the space of a single tweet.
Ben Smith was fixated on him. He spent the next month, Anderson recalled on a recent episode of The Ringer’s The Press Box, trying to get Anderson to broker contact and find a way to bring Woj into the BuzzFeed universe. The proposal, as Anderson understood it, was that Woj wouldn’t even have to write. He could just tweet. They were trying to figure out a way to harness the Twitter platform so he could keep breaking news the way he’d been, and have it drive traffic to BuzzFeed News.
Woj talked to them. He never came in for a meeting. Nothing materialized.
But Anderson remembered what the episode revealed about his boss, and about the moment.
“I was like, this is the only time that Ben Smith has been really interested in any sport story, any aspect of sports coverage,” he recalled. “He only cares about breaking the news.”
And somewhere in that observation, Anderson saw a signal about what the next decade of his career, and the industry around him, was going to look like. If the person running one of the most-talked-about digital news operations in the country cared about sports exactly once — and that once was about finding a way to redirect a breaking news machine — then the message was pretty clear about what kind of sports journalism was going to matter, and what kind wasn’t.
We never got a “What NBA newsbreaker would you be?” quiz, and sports journalism survived without it. What it didn’t survive, or at least didn’t survive intact, was the decade that followed, the one in which the logic that made Ben Smith fixate on Woj spread outward and downward through every outlet and platform until the breaking news tweet became the dominant unit of sports media currency.
The currency, as Woj eventually discovered, was vapor.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.