Howard Beck on NBA beat reporters
Credit: The Press Box Podcast
Another handful of newspaper sports departments were slashed last week when McClatchy laid off around 100 reporters, leaving the sports beat reporter job in as dire straits as ever before.
With the NFL as an exception, many pro sports teams and major college programs no longer have even one full-time, traveling reporter on the beat. Even The Athletic, which began as a hub for local sports coverage, has leaned into more national coverage over time.
Howard Beck, an NBA reporter and podcast host at The Ringer as well as the president of the Professional Basketball Writers’ Association, gave his thoughts this week on The Press Box podcast about how the rise of free content on the internet and, later, insiders like ESPN’s Shams Charania led to the deterioration of beat reporting around the Association.
“It’s 25 years later, we still haven’t fixed the ecosystem,” Beck said. “Various entities that produce content or deliver it figured it out, but the ecosystem remains irreparably broken, and I don’t know how we get that back.”
Beck came up as a newspaper beat reporter himself, covering the Los Angeles Lakers dynasty around the turn of the century and then the scandal-plagued New York Knicks. He understands social media has reduced the need for micro updates from traveling reporters, but believes beat writers hold teams accountable over a season and capture a team’s essence better than any national voice can.
“We have very specific jobs now,” he said. “The beat writer needs to be there to ask the question about, ‘Coach, why’d you make this substitution with two minutes left in the game?’ ‘Why did you run this particular play, why did this play not work?’ Somebody has to be there for all of that, and that’s the beat writers.
“The folks working for the teams, they all have their own media arms; they’re not asking the tough questions or any real good questions at all. The beat writers need to be there for that. But also, it’s the rapport that you build up … you get a better feel for them than the person watching from home or the reporter doing overview stuff.”
Why didn’t more reporters cover the Clippers story?!
We should ask their bosses, says @HowardBeck.
Full interview w/ HB + @loganmmurdock here:https://t.co/dHIsowYYGD pic.twitter.com/NCTxQ0vMhE
— Bryan Curtis (@bryancurtis) September 18, 2026
In the days when a newspaper was perhaps the best way for a fan to follow their local team, a beat reporter was the only one who could really give an update. As sports fandom has become more national and sometimes player-focused, and communication has become easier, insiders like Charania or Adrian Wojnarowski before him can cover all 30 teams themselves. Fans also find insiders’ updates far more easily on social media than behind the paywall of their local newspaper’s website.
“Shams is going to get like 90 percent of the scoops, including injury reports and trades when they happen, signings, coach hirings and firings. Fine,” Beck said.
“The beat writers, once upon a time, in a more democratized environment … would probably be the first one to tell you, ‘This knee is actually going to require season-ending surgery,’ or, ‘This coach is getting fired tomorrow.’ That used to be the domain of beat writers. And now it is pretty much all going to one person.”
Beyond the cuts at newspapers, local television stations are also smaller than they used to be. Many outlets have shut down entirely since the advent of the internet. Beck noted that The Athletic went from covering all 30 NBA teams before it was sold to The New York Times to coveringaround half of them today.
The conversation on The Press Box focused on how Pablo Torre dominated the Los Angeles Clippers salary cap circumvention scandal while local reporters added very little. The lack of oversight for businesses as big as NBA teams is damaging, but Beck believes that even the more celebratory parts of sports fandom suffer with less coverage, too.
“I think what maybe sports fans don’t realize they’re missing is a lot of, just, nuance and insight into the athletes that they love and that they are invested in,” he explained. “You know less about them if there’s no front-line beat writer to actually be there every day and get to understand them themselves so that they can convey that back to you, the fan. If that falls away, we have much less insight into our sports heroes.”