ESPN senior NFL insider Adam Schefter was preparing to report on an onslaught of deals to kick off the league’s free agent negotiating period Monday morning when X went down.
The social media platform, still the go-to destination for sports updates, was periodically unavailable for NFL fans because of widespread outages. But the disruption during one of the most frenetic stretches in the league’s annual news cycle hardly slowed Schefter.
ESPN showed his Instagram posts on TV instead, as it has done in the past. Host Laura Rutledge encouraged viewers to sign up for Schefter-specific alerts in the ESPN app, which more than 1 million people have opted in for since January. In between TV hits—and sometimes during them—Schefter kept readers on Facebook and Threads up-to-date too. Colleague Kevin Negandhi clamored for him to join Bluesky, where an automated account previously mirrored his X posts.
Fragmented on normal days, the web bordered on anarchic Monday. But news breakers find a way; they have no alternative.
There is some debate about the value of what Schefter does on X (and Instagram and Facebook and Threads), reporting transactions moments before other reporters when he isn’t breaking exclusive stories. But Kaitee Daley, ESPN SVP for digital, social and streaming content, said news represents one of the company’s most engaging forms of online content.
“Fans consistently turn to ESPN as their ‘fact check,’” Daley said. “We’re able to leverage the expertise of ESPN’s reporters, news desk, editors and distribution specialists to give fans the best of both worlds—trust and speed.”
And no one has cracked the code like Schefter, who now has more than 16 million followers across five platforms.
Though ESPN talent has access to media distribution tool Greenfly, Schefter prefers to manually run his social accounts. On Monday, SportsCenter anchor Matt Barrie announced the details of Sam Darnold’s contract with the Seattle Seahawks before adding, “That’s according to our Adam Schefter, who I believe was literally Instagramming that and X’ing that behind this wall.”
At other times, Schefter could be seen with a phone in each hand—or with both plopped down on the desk in front of him. Ahead of free agency, Schefter bought an iPhone 16 for himself, having learned that corporate only had 15’s to dish out. He held onto his old iPhone 13 as well after thinking about auctioning it off for Michigan NIL dollars, a la Woj.
But Schefter is not always a one-man, two-phone army. A three-person design team—Grant Goldberg, Sean Reilly and Kaylen Buschhorn—supplied visuals for him to post. And senior social media managers Dean Berhow-Goll and Reva Labbe Kingsbury occasionally helped man his accounts Monday. He posted more than 55 times on X between noon and 7 p.m., alleged cyberattack and all, while remaining a constant face on television too.
App editors helped push out mobile alerts throughout the day, some of which also go to a wider audience signed up for general breaking news. ESPN says Schefter’s alerts have seen roughly twice as many tap-throughs to the app as the average push. They often land at about the same time his news hits social media, if not earlier.
As ESPN prepares a new version of its app this fall alongside a new direct-to-consumer subscription offering, the pushes represent another element of the fan experience that the company hopes to provide within its owned platform. But as Schefter’s multi-site posting habits show, ESPN is also committed to reaching fans wherever they are, on whatever service happens to be functioning that day.