Last week, ESPN laid off Zach Lowe, their best basketball journalist. Lowe’s firing serves as a confirmation of a decades-long shift in corporate media strategy level: from the 20th-century sports writer to prioritize talking heads in their stead.
Lowe is my favorite basketball journalist. While many analysts at ESPN specialize in one aspect of coverage, Lowe is incredibly versatile, bridging the gap between the network’s massive web of specialists. If you want to get informed on the real depth and beauty of basketball, you need to listen to his podcast “The Lowe Post.” This is the role of the senior writer, and he plays it better than anyone. He can converse with coaches, collective bargaining analysts and roster construction specialists, contextualizing their coverage and expertise to elevate the sport as a whole. The on-court product of basketball is rightfully the main attraction, but the layers underneath are equally fascinating if given proper respect. In theory, this was why Lowe had an over seven-figure paycheck; ESPN understood that without him, they were sabotaging their own journalistic quality.
The internet has democratized and, in a sense, sensationalized sports coverage. The traditional barriers to entry no longer exist, and anybody can spew their opinions on the internet. While this is a good thing for the possibilities of quality coverage, it places longstanding media companies in a desperate position, as they try to compete with organically grown audience bases that connect with certain personalities more than the network as a whole. This is a shift that has occurred across all news coverage, but its effects on sports coverage have manifested in a real cheapening of discourse, one which runs contrary to the sort of analysis that Lowe is known for.
As JJ Redick, the newly hired coach of the Lakers and a former employee at ESPN, put it on Lowe’s final podcast, sports coverage has become “a take industry” that often “asks the same question over and over again,” in an attempt to generate palatable narratives for casual fans. Max Kellerman’s famous response, “I want Iguodala,” after being asked on “First Take” whether he would rather have Andre Iguodala or Stephen Curry take the last shot in an important game, represents perfectly the antithesis of old journalistic standards. The more comically bad the take that ESPN platforms, the more the NBA and its players become caricatures of themselves, merely reductive talking points to stir up repetitive discourse.
For this reason, it is deeply saddening to see Lowe go. I believe that in any sport, there should be journalists at the network level who represent the pinnacle of their sport’s coverage and help promote the on-court action, making the truth behind the game accessible to those who want to learn. The journalists and writers with deep connections within the league and network are capable of breathing life into the inner workings of a sport. While choosing talking heads over experts makes sense for the bottom line, it lessens the integrity of the work, something which is painfully noticeable when watching ESPN’s talk shows.
Lowe will have no trouble finding a new platform, whether that will be independently or for another network. It still stands, though, that his new destination will not be ESPN, the most powerful and influential entity in American sports coverage. Getting rid of Lowe is a massive mistake on ESPN’s part, and it fully represents the devolution of sports journalism at the network level.
