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ESPN picks up six prominent ex-Washington Post journalists
The Washington Post's sports department demonstrated excellence in many areas over the past few years, from news-making investigations through awarded work. However, the incredibly high-profile positions many of their figures have landed since the paper's stunning February decision to essentially close down their sports section adds further proof to how good that section was recently. Following the recent hires of six ex-WaPo figures by The Athletic/The New York Times, ESPN has made their own splashy moves, adding Kent Babb, Kareem Copeland, Chuck Culpepper, Robert Klemko, Tom Schad, and Ben Strauss to their Investigative, Enterprise and Digital Journalism Unit.
These individual figures are all notable. Strauss (who "will focus on sports business enterprise and investigative journalism") stands out as one of the few other people who's been covering the sports business and sports media world for quite some time, and he's done that very well. Babb and Culpepper stand out as figures who have excelled in coverage across sports, from columns to game writing to investigative work, and the release says they'll be used across sports at ESPN. Klemko has long been known for investigations in particular, including many focusing on the NFL at Sports Illustrated and USA Today (as well as being part of the Post cross-unit team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2024 for an investigation into the rise of the AR-15 and covering the Russia-Ukraine war for the Post). He "will focus on sports‑related crime, investigations and major scandals working mostly in the investigative wing of the larger unit."
Meanwhile, Schad was most recently a Washington Commanders reporter for the Post, but he's also known for previous work at USA Today, The Memphis Commercial Appeal, and The Washington Times. He'll be a general assignment reporter who focuses on enterprise, quick-turn, investigative and data journalism. And Copeland, who also covered a wide range of sports at the Post (and at the Associated Press before that) with a particular focus on men's and women's basketball and football, will have maybe the most specific role here: he will be "based in the Midwest covering women’s college basketball and the WNBA."
A lot of what I wrote in that previous piece on The Athletic's hires of ex-WaPo figures applies here also. This stands out as an endorsement of what the Post was doing, and is positive for seeing these very talented figures earning new opportunities to work in high-profile positions in their field. However, there's still a general sports journalism contraction here. That's maybe less so in the case of ESPN than The Athletic/the NYT (it certainly seems at least possible that these particular ESPN jobs were specially created after these figures became available), but we're still winding up with less people with well-paid jobs writing about sports thanks to this Post contraction. It's worked out fine for these specific people thanks to The Athletic and ESPN being interested in snapping them up, but that means those outlets have now used certain quantities of their budgets, meaning they can't/won't acquire other people that they might have brought in without the WaPo sports explosion.
A quite positive thing here, however, is seeing ESPN specifically hire six people known more for their journalistic writing than their specific TV presences. Yes, all of these figures certainly can do fine on TV, and they probably will make notable impacts there over the course of their contracts, especially given how much emphasis ESPN places on the TV realm these days. But this is a bit of a throwback to the ESPN The Magazine and Page 2 eras, where ESPN brought in people who were most known as writers.
The more recent years at ESPN have seen more emphasis on former athletes in particular as compared to writers. And that's an aspect where this sudden WaPo blowup may actually prove beneficial for sports journalism overall. It's easy to conceive ESPN adding one or two people from a writing background without the WaPo situation, but the WaPo decision made many more top talents available. And it's not hard to see these new ESPN hires having a positive influence on how that company handles news and journalism.
There's a lot that remains to be seen in how this plays out. Will these six new figures be fully integrated into ESPN's promotional apparatus, and be hyped up as well as that company promotes tank-top wearing ex-punters who claim they don't want to talk politics, or not-presidential candidates? Can ESPN's "Investigative, Enterprise and Digital Journalism Unit" still make significant splashes in an era where that company has deliberately and repeatedly gone away from specific shows that showcased that work? We'll see. But for the moment, it's certainly nice to see six talented journalistic figures from WaPo Sports land prominent roles at ESPN. Their sports work is appreciated, and it will be good to see them get to continue it at a new high-profile destination.
