Oren Weisfeld didn’t mince words when Awful Announcing talked to him in June. The freelance journalist and author said teams have “taken different approaches to how they dole out access, and there’s no consistency or transparency.” Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment, he said, is “known as one of the stricter PR teams in professional sports,” but “not unique.” His broader argument, laid out in a Poynter piece titled “Welcome to the post-journalism era of professional sports,” is the one that should worry fans: independent reporting is being replaced by content the teams and leagues produce themselves. “I would argue that the vast majority of what fans are seeing is now in-house content,” he said, offering it as his opinion rather than a measured figure.
Who Controls the Room
The distinction matters because, by Weisfeld’s account, in-house content is not made by people trained to push. Team social media staff and athletes with their own podcasts, he said, “haven’t been trained to ask those kinds of questions, to research, and to do the homework.” He pointed to Pablo Torre’s reporting on the Clippers and Kawhi Leonard’s contract as the kind of story in-house content “will never even try to get to the bottom of,” and noted that beat reporters, who “theoretically” have the most access, did not break it. The NBA later investigated. On September 2, 2026, it fined the Clippers $30 million, stripped them of a first-round pick in each draft from 2029 through 2033 and suspended owner Steve Ballmer for a year, citing a “pattern of misconduct” under its salary-cap rules. The Clippers said they “vehemently reject” the findings and will challenge them in arbitration, and Leonard said he accepts “full responsibility for lapses in judgment” by people in his inner circle while denying any knowledge of an intent to circumvent the salary cap. Source: Al Jazeera.
Weisfeld also spoke with former NBA player Danny Green, who described how the rise of cell phone cameras during his career changed the room. Because anything a player says can be “chopped up, aggregated, and misrepresented online,” Weisfeld said, often by bad-faith actors rather than the person who filmed it, players are “less inclined to give vulnerable answers.”
What Fans Lose
He closes by warning that if the industry stops producing profile writers like Wright Thompson, who build real access and show what drives athletes, fans lose a kind of storytelling. Pressing leagues on access is “very hard,” he says, because “the leagues don’t need journalists to the same extent they used to in order to be profitable.” His only pitch is that replacing journalism with in-house content “risks jeopardizing the connection fans are building” with players and teams.
Weisfeld does not accuse reporters of being bought off, and this piece shouldn’t either. The trade he describes is structural: the team controls the room, the credential and the sit-down, and a reporter has to decide how often to test that. It is reasonable to worry about a profession calibrating its questions to the access it cannot afford to lose. The Torre story is the counterexample, a story that came from outside the access economy and was followed by a league investigation that found the Clippers broke league rules, findings the team disputes. It is also a reminder of how few outlets are positioned to do that work, and how little the people with power over access have to gain from fixing the problem.
VDG Sports, where Vince Douglas Gregory writes about the business and culture of sports, will keep asking who controls the room and what that costs the people watching from outside it.
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