Dianna Russini has been a top NFL newsbreaker for years but is still establishing herself as the top dog at The Athletic. Part of her new presence at the New York Times-owned sports media company is the podcast Scoop City, which launched this week and will feature her insider scoops alongside the brainy analysis of longtime backup quarterback Chase Daniel.
In a recent interview on Sports Media with Richard Deitsch about the launch of her podcast, Russini detailed why online news aggregators are one of the biggest concerns she has as an insider expanding into the looser, more conversational structure of a podcast.
“I’ve been challenged in this show already … just how far do I want to push it on this topic?” she explained. “I know all this went on. Do I really want to air this out? Is this going to start a headline? Am I going to get aggregated? Because that’s the new thing … the aggregators.”
Russini understands aggregator accounts, from social media platforms like X or Instagram or Facebook to news websites, help spread her reporting further. But the sting of a secondary source screwing up information that sources within the NFL can see has the potential to ruin relationships that she needs to do her job.
“(Aggregators) are wonderful in some spaces when they’re taking your information, and it’s reflected correctly, and you’re comfortable with it,” Russini said. “It’s when you’re being misrepresented and I’m telling you, there are a lot of bad feelings we experience as journalists, there’s nothing worse than when information is being put out there that’s false that you never reported, but somebody took it that way. It’s a horrible space to live in. It’s embarrassing too, because it’s not reflective, and you can’t do anything, and you feel a little bit like a hostage to it.”
In general, Russini constantly checks herself when it comes to providing information to the audience rather than keeping news private. However, the podcast space does allow for more context, which can ultimately be helpful for an insider to give the full scope of information rather than a social media post-length blurb.
“I’m always working from a space of forget the information, protect the source. It’s tempting, and you push, and I have a little ping-pong battle in my head at all times in every single show I do; how far can I go?” Russini explained. “Adam (Schefter) and Woj and all them, they know all the stuff … they just keep it in one layer most of the time because they don’t have to (add layers). They have other people doing that. Here, in a podcast form, in a column form, you have to share more.”
Russini shared that her former ESPN colleagues Schefter and Adrian Wojnarowski were valuable mentors for her, but she feels her job at The Athletic is different from theirs.
“What I discovered over the years, and even now in this new role at The Athletic, is what I do is very different than what Adam and Woj and Ian Rapoport and Tom Pelissero are doing right now,” Russini said. “And the reason why I believe that it’s different is because I am writing so much more about these stories and peeling back the layers compared to just the transaction of it, which is, by the way, very hard to get. And when I get [scoops], it’s great. They are machines; they’re phenomenal at it. But my role here is really just to continue to add a little bit more meat to the bones of stories.”
Many NFL reporters have decried aggregator accounts on X like Dov Kleiman, while entire businesses are built around news aggregation on the web at companies like Minute Media and ClutchPoints. There’s room for everyone in the sports content world, but where some may gain from getting engagement around juicy news, any bit of false info that spreads comes back to bite reporters like Russini.
[Sports Media with Richard Deitsch]
