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🎾 Tennis turnover. ESPN parted ways with two longtime tennis analysts ahead of the 2026 Australian Open, ending decades-long runs for both voices. Pam Shriver and Brad Gilbert confirmed their departures from the network on social media Tuesday after ESPN announced its broadcast team for the tournament. Shriver had been with ESPN since 1990, while Gilbert spent 23 years calling matches for the network.

🏈 Schefter v. Rapoport. Despite orbiting many of the biggest NFL stories opposite one another, Adam Schefter and Ian Rapoport rarely address each other’s reporting directly. This week’s news of the Baltimore Ravens parting ways with longtime head coach John Harbaugh left the two insiders at odds, with Schefter directly refuting Rapoport’s reporting in an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show. “I don’t think that information right there could be any less true,” Schefter said of Rapoport’s report that Harbaugh had lost the locker room before he was fired.

💰 An offer they could refuse. The latest in the ongoing battle for control over Warner Bros. Discovery remains the same as it has been for the better part of a month. Warner’s board has formally rejected another takeover offer from Paramount and new owner David Ellison. The ball is now back in Ellison’s court to decide whether or not Paramount will up its bid yet again in the hopes of wresting control of Warner away from Netflix.

🏈 Olsen eying options? Asked by Peter Schrager on The Schrager Hour whether he’d be interested in a front-office role similar to Troy Aikman’s consulting gig with the Dolphins or Matt Ryan’s expected move in Atlanta, Fox’s Greg Olsen didn’t equivocate. “There’s no question in my mind that I could do it,” Olsen said. “And I think I could do it well.” According to Olsen, NFL head coaches have already been calling him — not to kick around ideas, but to gauge interest in joining their staffs.

“We will wait every local paper out and let them continuously bleed until we are the last ones standing. We will suck them dry of their best talent at every moment. We will make business extremely difficult for them.”

That infamous quote came courtesy of Alex Mather, a co-founder of The Athletic, in a 2017 interview with the New York Times.

For a time, those words seemed prophetic. However, The Athletic did what all trendy startups do. It burned through cash, failed to achieve profitability, and began seeking a buyer. Meanwhile, many of those writers and reporters who jumped ship ended up jumping back.

There was a bit of irony when, six years later, the Times bought The Athletic and purged its own sports department, simultaneously disproving and proving Mather’s sentiments.

I mention that notorious quote because, regardless of what happened with The Athletic, the sentiment behind it was very much how many Silicon Valley and tech people thought about newspapers (and, well, everything else). They saw newspapers and traditional journalism as stodgy, archaic, and unprofitable. Couple those notions with venture capital and rich people with fragile egos, and that’s essentially how we find ourselves in the situation we’re in now.

On Wednesday, Block Communications, the owner of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, a newspaper whose roots date back to 1786, announced it will cease operations of the western Pennsylvania publication on May 3. In its own report on its shuttering, Block revealed that it has lost more than $350 million in cash operating the newspaper over the past two decades.

In a perfect metaphorical flourish, ownership blamed a recent court ruling that required the company to honor its 2014 labor contract for the decision.

For our purposes, the decision means that a robust sports reporting division dedicated to covering Pittsburgh’s many professional and college teams will be disbanded. It includes columnist Joe Starkey, Pitt reporter Christopher Carter, editor Rob Joesbury, Penguins and Pirates reporter Jason Mackey, Pitt sports reporter Abby Schnable, enterprise reporter Noah Hiles, and Gerry Dulac, who has been covering the Steelers and golf for the paper since 1993.

The Post-Gazette is hardly the first notable newspaper to shut down in recent years, but these are gut-punches to the media industry all the same. A critical resource to its readers for generations, the paper won several Pulitzer Prizes, including in 2019 for its coverage of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting.

Its departure will leave the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which went digital in 2016, as the largest daily media outlet serving the Greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area.

It’s hard not to get despondent about the state of the industry (amongst so many other things these days), and the truth is that this closure is a feature, not a bug. There is more to come as the media industry continues to devalue expertise and trust for whatever the hell Jeff Bezos is doing with the Washington Post.

Amidst the bleakness, we can look to the good work that’s still being done. Media companies and their billionaire owners might be giving up on journalists, but journalists aren’t giving up on doing what they do best.

Also on Wednesday, Gabe Fernandez at SFGate published a piece about a local university shutting down its embattled football program following their interview with head coach and athletic director Desmond Gumbs, amid allegations of inadequate medical and training services, haphazard red-eye travel itineraries, and lackluster food and water availability for players.

In that interview, Gumbs accused a USA Today journalist of having “raped” him with his reporting of the allegations and also threatened Fernandez following the conversation.

“After agreeing to pose for some photos immediately after the initial interview, Gumbs offered a slate of parting words regarding any mention of that critical story about his program,” wrote Fernandez. “He first said that writing this story ‘would not be good for you or your paper,’ and then added, ‘you don’t want to make an enemy out of me.’ He finally shared that ESPN was also working on a story about Lincoln and insisted that SFGate ‘let ESPN be the bad guy’ because he knew the reporter assigned to chase it, and added, ‘I know where he lives.’”

Reading this story a few hours after reading about the Post-Gazette’s impending closure gave me a modicum of hope.

Once the digital home of the San Francisco Chronicle, SFGate is now its own media entity, covering the Bay Area and beyond, earning awards and recognition as it grows. It’s not a newspaper in the traditional, tactile sense, but it’s every bit the journalistic endeavor that the Post-Gazette and so many other companies were before it. It’s an evolution, not a discarding.

Journalism, like nature, finds a way. And there’s something heartening about knowing so many reporters, writers, editors, and staffers still want to fight the good fight.

Or, to put it simply, tell the stories that need to be told.

“It’s selfish, that’s what it is. It’s stupid.” - ACC Network’s Jimbo Fisher on Lane Kiffin’s job-hopping.

“Damn, u gotta be a real sell out n above all a square to be on ESPN nowadays. Used to love that show.” - Jets WR Garrett Wilson calling out Stephen A. Smith and First Take.

“I absolutely loved it way more than I thought I would, and I had an incredible team to help me out. Everybody at CBS, but obviously Ian [Eagle]. Having a guy like Ian who is a stellar play-by-play guy but also has the wit and the humor and the personality to play off of, we had such great chemistry.” - J.J. Watt reflecting on his first season in the CBS NFL booth.

“Hey, if you watched that Denver Nuggets game last night, you witnessed the greatest, most-impressive win of the season. And I’m the dummy that told you not to watch. Really. Seriously, I’m sorry about that.” - 9NEWS Denver sports anchor Scotty Gange after telling viewers not to watch the Nuggets-Sixers.

“And as a broadcaster, he’s just blah. He’s so blah, he’s terribly blah. It’s all captain obvious, silly, lame. He tries to be funny, it’s just goofy. He’s not cut out to be a broadcaster to start with, and they’re trying to prop him up.” - Skip Bayless, not a fan of Fox broadcaster Tom Brady.

Wednesday morning, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good was behind the wheel of an SUV on a residential Minneapolis street that momentarily blocked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) trucks. After agents got out of the truck, one walked up to the SUV and yanked on the driver’s door handle, ordering her to get out, yelling, “Get out of the car. Get the f*** out of the car.” As she began to drive away, an ICE officer fired multiple gunshots into the car, killing Good. The agents then reportedly blocked an ambulance and a doctor from offering her life-saving services.

While not the first person to be killed by an ICE agent, Good’s death feels like the inevitable tragedy we’ve all been waiting for inside the tinderbox we’re currently living in. And the immediate reactions to it have reinforced the divide between those in power and those in the communities these federal agents have been terrorizing.

Minneapolis now finds itself in a situation it knows all too well. A horrific tragedy that feels like the culmination of an out-of-control, violent trend that jumps the guardrails into the national discourse, becoming an inflection point in where we go from here.

With the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests, the gossamer-thin line between the news world and sports world evaporated quickly. ESPN’s “stick to sports” mandate, whatever form it had at the time, fell by the wayside as several Worldwide Leader talents shared their thoughts on TV and social media. Even when it went poorly, sports-centric hosts from all over the industry entered the fray. The sense that this was a story too important to worry about “sticking to sports” over was clear.

We’re only one day in, but it remains to be seen if we see something similar over Good’s killing. There’s no doubt that this situation is only just starting, and it’s hard to tell how it’s going to play out. But in the meantime, either by edict or by choice, most sports-centric personalities are staying out of it.

Some notable exceptions were ESPN’s Mina Kimes, who posted pointedly about the situation on both Bluesky and X. Pablo Torre also wasn’t afraid to take a stance. For what it’s worth, Stephen A. Smith discussed the shooting on his SiriusXM show, though ESPN has made it abundantly clear they have nothing to do with what Smith says there.

This is, of course, a different ecosystem than 2020. The corporate world has bent the knee to President Donald Trump in an attempt to either get something from him, appease him, or stay off his radar. That goes for sports media and sports businesses as well. Having their on-air talent throw down about something he clearly stands behind could put a target on their backs (not to mention their stock price).

And so we wait. We wait to see how this unfolds. We wait to see what people say and do. We wait to see what happens if someone “steps out of line.” And we wait to see what many people and companies truly stand for when it comes down to it.