Portland Trailblazers point guard Damian Lillard surprised people this summer by breaking news on media members when they were joining new media outlets. His first twweet of this nature was when he reported that reporter Michael Haynes was leaving ESPN to join Yahoo Sports and later in the summer he also broke the news of Sam Amick joining the Athletic.
Lillard was having fun with breaking news on media member and most of social media also enjoyed the role reversal. Social media has expanded the journalism world where everyone has access to the latest story on professional athletes and has also made them very accessible as opposed to before.
In an interview with The Athletic, Lillard explains what he was trying to convey with breaking news on the media,
It was just a case of putting the shoe on the other foot. I think there’s a lot of stuff that we go through as players, or a story might come out that might have a little bit of truth, but somebody adds (to it) or put their own spin on it or whatever. We don’t have a chance to say, ‘No, I don’t want that to get out. Yeah, it happened, or yeah that’s accurate but I don’t really want that story to be told at the moment. I don’t want to have to deal with that right now. Our situation is just not considered a lot of times.
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I’m just basically showing you how it feels to be vulnerable, I guess, or to be at somebody else’s mercy about something that you might not want out.
… It’s almost like anybody can report anything now. I’m not a journalist, I’ve never done this before, but all of a sudden I can report something and it’s fair game, you know what I’m saying? Why is that even respected? Now if it was CJ, that’s one thing, he went to school for journalism, and he does that. He does podcasts, and he writes articles and things like that. I don’t, so that was part of it. Anybody can drop this information.
Lillard has some valid points, most athletes get annoyed by the media when news that they may not necessarily want made public becomes available. Unfortunately due to the multi million dollar industry that professional sports has become everyone is rushing to report breaking news first even though it may not be totally factual. We’ll see if this move by Lillard has made some media members a little empathic to athletes when they break news on them.
It was fun to see the roles reversed for the little bit of time Lillard was breaking news.