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 necessary. Both issues appeared attainable.
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 change into 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 title would possibly as nicely have been Scoops — walked up to Anderson and requested him a query that, on reflection, stated every little thing 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 change into probably the most useful 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 fixated on him. He spent the subsequent month, Anderson recalled on a recent episode of The Ringer’s The Press Box, attempting to get Anderson to dealer contact and discover a manner to deliver Woj into the BuzzFeed universe. The proposal, as Anderson understood it, was that Woj wouldn’t even have to write. He might simply tweet. They have been attempting to determine a manner to harness the Twitter platform so he might hold breaking information the way in which he’d been, and have it drive site visitors to BuzzFeed News.
Woj talked to them. He by no means got here in for a gathering. Nothing materialized.
But Anderson remembered what the episode revealed about his boss, and in regards to 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 statement, Anderson noticed a sign about what the subsequent decade of his profession, and the trade round him, was going to seem like. If the particular person working one of many most-talked-about digital information operations within the nation cared about sports activities precisely as soon as — and that after was about discovering a manner 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 form wasn’t.
When we have been speaking about insiders this week, @byjoelanderson instructed us in regards to the time that BuzzFeed acquired eager about 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 didn’t survive, or at the very least didn’t survive intact, was the last decade that adopted, the one through which the logic that made Ben Smith fixate on Woj unfold outward and downward via each outlet and platform till the breaking information tweet grew to become the dominant unit of sports activities media forex.
The forex, as Woj eventually discovered, was vapor.
