BuzzFeed apparently tried to hire Adrian Wojnarowski
In the autumn of 2013, Joel Anderson arrived at BuzzFeed with a plan. He was going to be a senior sports activities author. He was additionally going to find out how to make GIFs, as a result of this was BuzzFeed, and the forex of the second was digital fluency. Both issues appeared vital. Both issues appeared doable.
Within six months, the sports activities vertical was gone.
Anderson ended up underneath BuzzFeed’s investigative editor, a part of the early structure of what would grow to be the nationwide desk, doing work that had nothing to do with what he’d imagined when he took the job. And then, someday within the months that adopted, Ben Smith — the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, a person whose center identify would possibly as effectively have been Scoops — walked up to Anderson and requested him a query that, looking back, mentioned all the things about the place sports activities media was already heading.
“Do you know Woj?”
Anderson did. Not personally, however he knew who Adrian Wojnarowski was. Everyone in sports activities media knew who Wojnarowski was by then. He was the Yahoo Sports NBA reporter whose Twitter feed had grow to be probably the most beneficial actual property in sports activities media, a person who might finish a information cycle and begin a brand new one within the house of a single tweet.
Ben Smith was fastened on him. I’ve spent the following month, Anderson recalled on a recent episode of The Ringer’s The Press Boxattempting to get Anderson to dealer contact and discover a approach to carry Woj into the BuzzFeed universe. The proposal, as Anderson understood it, was that Woj would not even have to write. He might simply tweet. They had been attempting to work out a approach to harness the Twitter platform so he might preserve breaking information the best way he’d been, and have it drive visitors to BuzzFeed News.
Woj talked to them. I’ve by no means are available in for a gathering. Nothing materialized.
But Anderson remembered what the episode revealed about his boss, and concerning the second.
“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 someplace in that commentary, Anderson noticed a sign about what the following decade of his profession, and the trade round him, was going to appear to be. If the particular person operating one of many most-talked-about digital information operations within the nation cared about sports activities precisely as soon as — and that when was about discovering a approach to redirect a breaking information machine — then the message was fairly clear about what sort of sports activities journalism was going to matter, and what type wasn’t.
When we had been speaking about insiders this week, @byjoelanderson instructed us concerning the time that BuzzFeed acquired fascinated with hiring Woj.
Full pod: https://t.co/wCXX50Nech pic.twitter.com/nDf3xASqo5
—Bryan Curtis (@bryancurtis) April 15, 2026
We by no means acquired a “What NBA newsbreaker would you be?” quiz, and sports activities journalism survived with out it. What it did not survive, or at the least did not survive intact, was the last decade that adopted, the one wherein the logic that made Ben Smith fastened on Woj unfold outward and downward via each outlet and platform till the breaking information tweet turned the dominant unit of sports activities media forex.
The forex, as Woj eventually discoveredwas steam.
