Yahoo and ESPN use riches to lure sportswriters
A few teams are rich and getting richer, hunting more avidly than ever for talent, raiding the less-endowed leagues, poaching free agents and bidding the prices of star players to unheard-of heights.
But the high-paid objects of desire are not pitchers, running backs or point guards - they are sportswriters.
ESPN and Yahoo Sports are on a furious hiring binge, offering reporters and columnists more than they ever imagined they could make in journalism. ESPN, in particular, has gone after the biggest stars at newspapers and magazines, signing them for double and triple what they were earning - $150,000 to $350,000 a year for several writers, and far more for a select handful.
Some print publications, notably Sports Illustrated, have selectively tried to keep up with the lucrative ESPN and Yahoo offers, to retain some of their writers or attract new ones. But for the most part, newspapers, though they are being forced to raise some salaries, cannot keep up. Several say they are suffering through the worst talent drain their editors can recall.
“My counteroffer usually comes down to asking them what kind of cake they want at their goodbye party,” said Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, assistant managing editor for sports at The Washington Post, which has lost three writers to ESPN in the last year and a half. “The numbers they throw around are out of reach.”
The competition for writers has even produced bidding wars, especially for big-name columnists like Rick Reilly (from Sports Illustrated to ESPN), Howard Bryant (from The Post to ESPN) and Selena Roberts (from The New York Times to Sports Illustrated) - but also for less widely known reporters. People who were briefed on the deals said that Reillys contract, easily the biggest of the recent signings, was worth more than $3 million a year.
“Its the exact same model as what happened to athletes,” said Leigh Steinberg, a top sports agent. “Were seeing free agency for sports journalists.”
Rising demand for star sportswriters, driven by rising television and Internet revenue, coincides with the declining fortunes of newspapers, which has left fewer jobs and less money to go around for most journalists. The paradox is not lost on the lucky few who benefit.
“This hiring at a high level, I know how amazing it is, given whats happening everywhere else in the business,” said Mark Fainaru-Wada, who uncovered steroid scandals as a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and a co-author of the book “Game of Shadows.” He was recently hired by ESPN. “We just went through a 25 percent newsroom cut at The Chronicle,” he said.
On most topics, nearly all of the news offerings from Yahoo are collected from other sources. But not in sports, where the company has made its first major foray into being a creator of original material.
It has more than 20 sports staff writers, up from four just two years ago, in addition to sports celebrities who write columns for the site.
Many staff members at Yahoo Sports are less prominent - and less well compensated - than the people signed by ESPN, and many of them cover niche topics like mixed martial arts and fantasy football. But Yahoo Sports has shown it intends to play in the big leagues, hiring David Morgan, former deputy sports editor of The Los Angeles Times, as its executive editor. It is also making lucrative offers to some of the journalists hired by ESPN and Sports Illustrated and signing a few sought-after people like Mike Silver, a football writer who was lured away from Sports Illustrated.
The biggest engine behind the competition for writers is ESPN, owned by Walt Disney, a financial juggernaut that is a leading force in sports on television, the Internet, radio and in print.
Garcia-Ruiz echoed a commonly held view when he called ESPN “the single most successful sports enterprise in the world.”
ESPN declines to reveal precise numbers, but in the last 18 months, it has hired at least 15 writers and editors from major newspapers and magazines, most of whom are expected to feed material to all of its platforms. Vince Doria, senior vice president and director of news, says that ESPN has 80 to 100 reporters and producers, not including its many columnists, where “five years ago, that number was closer to 50.”
ESPN.com is one of the most popular sports sites on the Web, with 20 million visitors in November, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, behind only Yahoo Sports, with more than 22 million. The Web site holds the bulk of what the writers produce, much of which is never seen on printed pages or heard on the air, including news, features, analysis, commentary and articles to accompany segments produced for television.
