American Magazine: November 2016

Esther Enkin, ONO’s president and ombudsman
for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
estimates there are about 140 worldwide.
Employing an ombudsman “signals to your
audience that you recognize you have amazing
power, and that there is no mechanism for
accountability, so you create this mechanism,”
says Kelly McBride, vice president and
ethicist at the Poynter Institute, a journalism
think tank. When a panel of faculty from the
organization served as ESPN’s public editor
from 2011 to 2012, she headed it.
“The thing about being the ombudsman for
ESPN is they have so many lines of business,
and so much of what they do is controversial,”
McBride says. “You have to be thinking about
it and consuming it all the time. The other
challenge is it’s a contract position, as opposed
to someone in residence. It’s very hard from
a distance to develop the relationships and
sources that you need to be effective. Given
those restrictions the challenge is to select the
right topic. I think Jim’s very good at sorting
through everything and picking interesting
topics. He’s got a really sharp mind.”
Always a rabid sports nut, Brady dreamt
of a career as a sportswriter. When the Post
hired him to be a part-time one in 1987 (he
was a sophomore at AU), he quickly realized
that his romantic notion of the job was way off
base. Working nights and weekends, groveling
for interviews with disinterested players,
watching games alongside grumpy reporters
in the hushed press box while fans cheered
in the stands was hardly glamorous. The last
straw came in Baltimore, where an Oriole’s
sweaty jock strap nearly decapitated him.
“It whizzed right by my head,” he says,
chuckling. “I was told someone was trying to
throw it in the bin in the middle of the locker
room, but they missed by five or six feet. If
you’re throwing a jock strap into a bin every
night for six months, I doubt you miss by
six feet.”
After eight years at the Post, Brady began
sensing that the media landscape was shifting.
He jumped to the digital world, working for
companies including AOL before becoming
executive editor of WashingtonPost.com
in 2004. There he instituted cutting edge
features like comments and blogs that
aggravated traditionalists on the paper’s print
side but grew page views. When he left in
2009 to join TBD.com, WashingtonPost.com
was among the most visited news destinations
in the country.
In 2014, Brady used a sizable chunk of his
own coin ($500,000, according to Philadelphia
magazine), to start Spirited Media, a mobilefocused
local news company that owns and
operates sites in Philadelphia (BillyPenn.com)
and Pittsburgh (TheIncline.com). Its target
is the 40-and-under demographic, which he
believes is being ignored by traditional media.
“They want news on their phone, and they
want to go somewhere they can get everything
in one place,” he says. “They want things to be
simple, they don’t want to fight through four
pop-up ads and an auto-play.”
Like any new venture, let alone a dot.com
one, success is far from guaranteed, but sitting
in the living room of his Great Falls, Virginia,
home in July, Brady seems confident about
the future. His affinity for jeans, which he’s
wearing, will likely be one of three character
quirks mentioned in his eulogy, along with his
love for Diet Coke, which he’s sipping steadily
from a Shaquille O’Neal-sized Double Gulp
cup. The third? The Jets, of course.
“Being a Jets fan won’t
affect his judgement?
You’re a f*#@ing Jets
fan, how good could your
judgement be in the
first place?”-@foxboro1212
Brady attended every home game from 1974
to 1985, and fall Sundays are still sacred,
reserved for watching Gang Green with his
dad and graying beagles, Hank and Fred. This
almost evangelical devotion to sports is why,
despite running a startup, he couldn’t pass up
the public editor gig when ESPN offered him
the 18-month post last year.
“I pitched doing the job a little bit
differently, which was getting away from the
daily police blotter kind of stuff. I wanted to
get the readers into it more,” says Brady, who
started Twitter and Facebook accounts for
the public editor. “I’m fascinated by ESPN.
They have these massive contracts with these
leagues at the same time they have to cover
them. That’s the inherent conflict they deal
with every day, and that’s part of what I’m
trying to get at.”
Of the topics he’s covered, none has
received more attention than the network’s
handling of Deflategate, the almost farcical
Patriots football-deflating scandal that resulted
in a four-game suspension for golden boy
quarterback Tom Brady.
“Inside ESPN, its Deflategate missteps are
viewed as isolated incidents coming out of
different departments on different platforms,”
he wrote. “Outside ESPN, these missteps are
viewed by many as part of a concerted effort
to assist the NFL in impugning the Patriots.
The difference between the two positions
is that while the network’s critics have been
consistently loud and persistent, ESPN has
been largely silent. This strategy, in my view,
has served the network poorly.”
Despite taking the network to task for some
unfair treatment of the franchise, he received
plenty of vitriolic feedback, much of it from New
England fans. This is the dilemma of the job.
“If you write anything too nice about
ESPN all the readers think you’re a shill,
and if you write anything that’s too critical
people inside of ESPN will get annoyed with
you. So what?” Brady says. “Some people
don’t quite understand the general concept.
If you’re an EMT in Boston and some guy’s
having a heart attack on a street corner
wearing a Jets jersey, you don’t say, ‘Screw
that guy.’ You save his life because you’re an
EMT. My job is to evaluate the journalism; it
is not even the vaguest of problems in my life
to separate my Jets fandom.”
The irony of the fact that he shares a
surname with the dimple-chinned Pats
quarterback (who owns a 27-7 record as a
starter against the Jets) is not lost on Brady. He
implicitly understands the passion sports can
elicit. So does his living room wall, which bears
a permanent crack from a losing encounter
with his fist following a heartbreaking Jets loss
(aren’t they all?) in 2009.
Violent outbursts are a thing of the past,
says Brady, who swears he’s mild mannered
in all other facets of his life. As the journalistic
watchdog of the self-proclaimed “worldwide
leader,” Brady is keenly aware of the weight of
his words.
“Even a company the size of ESPN is going
to be in trouble if it doesn’t listen to what its
consumers want and note how they react to
the brand,” he says “I think [the public editor]
plays a valuable role as long as you go into it
knowing you’re never going to make everybody
happy. I spent most of my high school life not
being popular, so I’m used to it.”
Pretty heady stuff. For a Jets fan.
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