Adrian Wojnarowski was the perfect reporter for a weird age of NBA news
Woj was the pre-eminent newsbreaker of the social media era, a time where being first to a news story became the most important thing in NBA journalism.
Adrian Wojnarowski suddenly announced his retirement Wednesday, capping a 37-year journalism career where he became the most well-known NBA reporter in the world. While he delivered plenty of his patented “Woj bombs” about the Golden State Warriors, he was a league-wide sensation, seemingly knowing every trade, signing, and draft pick before they happened. You could argue that Woj is the reporter most responsible for the transaction-dominated, 12-months-a-year NBA discourse that dominates the basketball landscape.
Woj was really good at it. In an era of access journalism, Wojnarowski had the best access, the most sources, and the ruthlessness to barter information and favorable coverage so he could become the first to get news. His old protege Shams Charania has challenged Woj in recent years, but the young FanDuel TV star is following the Woj template.
ESPN got so sick of getting scooped by Wojnarowksi, especially when he’d tweet out picks minutes before they aired on the network’s NBA draft coverage, they opened up the vault to hire him away from Yahoo! Sports. Reportedly, Woj had a $7M per year gig with the network that he’s walking away from to become a college basketball general manager. ESPN also let Woj clean house when he arrived in 2017, with writers like Marc “The Stein Line” Stein and Ethan Sherwood Strauss losing their jobs when the scoop master arrived.
But it’s strange that the ability to be “first” became so incredibly valuable. While it was impressive that Woj could always predict draft choices, it’s hard to quantify the value of announcing news 90 seconds before it happens and becomes public information. Clearly getting scooped drove ESPN personnel crazy, but it’s not like Woj’s X account was a cash cow for the network. And if Woj got beat to a story by someone, usually Shams, then ESPN had to feel like they were wasting their millions.
It’s akin to the old trend of internet commenters rushing to post “first” on a new post, article, video, or anything with a comments section. Getting updates on social media and seeing new things provides a tiny dopamine hit, one reason NBA fans spend the trade deadline and start of free agency refreshing their phones. But Scoop Culture doesn’t necessarily provide analysis or deep knowledge; it’s just a competition to be first.
It can be exhausting, and even more so for the reporters who are involved. ESPN’s NFL newsbreaker, Adam Schefter, speculated that Woj is walking away from $21M because he “wanted his life back.” Schefter describes the life of a newsbreaker, where a reporter can’t even visit a urinal without a phone, forced to “hold it in one hand while you take care of your business in the other.”
But it’s also worth wondering why we need these newsbreakers to give up their lives, sleeping three hours a night during the season. Charania told New York Magazine that he has to take Lyfts everywhere, since he couldn’t text while driving, or hold phone conversations on a train. He even describes using his nose to type on his phone while eating, because “I’ll do anything to get the text off.” That’s no way to live!
After all, these are just tweets (or X posts, or Elon bombs, or whatever we should call them now). It’s not a surprise that the rise of social media has de-emphasized “long reads” — in depth, longer sports articles — because the most important aspect is getting the tweet off. (Obviously, Golden State of Mind is a thriving, multi-million dollar operation and we love our dedicated readers.)
It’s hard to imagine that, despite how good he is at it, Woj imagined this being his future when he got into journalism. And it makes all kinds of sense that he’d simply want to step off the treadmill after seven years of scoop races at ESPN. His Woj bombs will be missed, but perhaps we should all consider why it matters to us to learn a draft pick’s identity 20 seconds before he gets selected.