With a seat left empty on the NBA Today desk after Adrian Wojnarowski's sudden resignation on Wednesday, ESPN tapped a handful of its scoopsters in others sports to fill in. NFL insider Adam Schefter is ESPN's closest analog to Woj, a fellow 50-something reporter who has made himself indispensable by dutifully working a network of agents and front-office figures in order to report out huge transactions and marginalia before anyone else. As such, his comments on the show were incisive and revealing.
"Basically, [Wojnarowski] wanted his life back," Schefter said. "He didn't want to have to work on holidays. He didn't want to be away from more family gatherings. He didn't want to have to—as we've had to do in the past—take a shower with your phone up against the shower door, so you could see a text that's coming in, or take your phone with you to the urinal and hold it in one hand, while you're trying to take care of your business in the other. That's the life that we live. And that was the life that he chose not to do any longer, because it takes over your life. You can't kind of do the job. You have to live the job, and he was done living the job. He wants to go live his life."
MLB insider Jeff Passan and college football reporter Pete Thamel chuckled at the shower detail, but Schefter wasn't laughing. The tribute to a colleague had briefly turned into a frank assessment of the scoopster lifestyle. The price, as Schefter put it, is the ability to live normally.
The scoopster mindset is necessarily totalizing, but it wasn't that way when Wojnarowski or Schefter started out. Sports media was subject to profound changes throughout the 17 years that Wojnarowski spent working for Yahoo Sports and ESPN, changes he typified, accelerated, and ultimately abandoned. His career can be read as personal triumph: He accrued as much power in the league he covered as any reporter possibly could have hoped for. It can also be seen as tragedy: He thrived in a media environment where omnipresence and speed made the job impossible to do without continued sacrifice.
Before the phenomenon of the Woj Bomb, Wojnarowski was a prolific columnist and author. He made a name for himself on Twitter because his signature munition was perfectly formed for the medium, with fans seemingly learning of NBA transactions as they happened, rather than on the next edition of SportsCenter. Wojnarowski broke the news of Kawhi Leonard and Paul George joining the Clippers around 2 a.m. ET, and his report on the Lakers' pursuit of UConn coach Dan Hurley dropped before 7 a.m. Player movement became both more frequent and more of a story in the post-Decision NBA, and Wojnarowski was the stage director of the drama. When he reported free-agent deals and significant trades, and used his thesaurus to tip draft picks, he was providing news to basketball fans but also simultaneously making himself, willingly or not, a key part of the process. And those fans saw him as the foremost authority. Big-time transactions were only real if Woj's name was on them.
Wojnarowski made his reputation during a structurally bleak time for basketball writing. To tell a long story quickly, digital media was eating away at print media, and social media was eating away at both. By the time Woj went to ESPN, there was no percentage in the type of column writing he did for Yahoo Sports anymore, so he helped to denude his new employer's NBA desk of anything with a voice in favor of harder news. This was to ESPN's structural advantage: The network paid a steep price for TV rights and therefore had a market incentive to produce news about the NBA. The product was foremost a spectacle; Woj Bombs were an aspect of that spectacle.
And that spectacle gained him power. A 2023 Washington Post article noted that owners "ask Woj for hiring recommendations on coaches and general managers." As Schefter hinted at in his bleak speech, though, that kind of access is a Faustian bargain. In order to be the first person to tweet out news that, say, Facundo Campazzo had signed with the Nuggets, Woj had to be available at all times. He had to maintain a complex network of relationships and be in constant conversation with numerous power brokers, becoming a perfectly frictionless node of information that reportedly took him down to three hours of sleep per night. Wojnarowski's new job, as general manager of the St. Bonaventure men's basketball program, might still be stressful and public-facing, but it is far less demanding.
What Wojnarowski had to do to be excellent at his job surely became harder to balance over time. He had a family, as well as increased competition. His former pupil, Shams Charania, became a rival at The Athletic. Charania has been transcribing agent texts since he was a teenager, and by all accounts does not have much of a personal life to sacrifice in service of his career. A line from a 2022 New York Post profile mentions how "he’s not pursuing a mate at this time." A New York magazine story revealed that he averages 18 hours of screen time per day and regularly sends dozens of texts to sources and would-be sources, wishing them a happy Father's Day or Labor Day. (One NBA team employee told me about Charania once sending a "Happy Columbus Day!" text.)
To what degree was Wojnarowski himself responsible for the innovations in sports media that eventually exhausted him? That's up for debate, but no other basketball reporter was as successful as him during an era of rapid change. The scoopster is a job that can only be held by few, but won't be defunct any time soon. While it's easy to dismiss Schefter's gripes with the job as frivolous, there's something truly grim about it. A healthy life requires human interaction, engaging with the world around you. While the job of a journalist can be demanding, it's not meant to be spent on high alert in the bathroom so as not to miss a scoop about whether an NFL player will receive the franchise tag. Wojnarowski benefited greatly from this career path and found an opportunity to step away with some dignity. The next insider, aspiring to reach his heights, might not be as fortunate.
