Earlier this week, investigative journalist Nicole Noren did something almost impossible for someone who has spent her career behind the scenes.
She made herself the story.
The longtime producer for ESPN’s Outside the Lines used her own experience to shed light on the way sports betting partnerships are warping sports media coverage. The issue wasn’t how ESPN was covering sports gambling, but that it was doing so less and less.
Noren was used to pitching hard-hitting stories around leagues, owners and athletes. As a producer for the investigative reporting arm of the sports network, her team had traditionally been insulated from the business concerns at ESPN, but she started to notice a change about seven years ago.
“What was telling to me was that I had pitched numerous stories that would take a harder look at some of the gambling companies and addiction, and none of those stories was greenlit,” Noren told the Columbia Journalism Review in an interview with journalist Danny Funt. “They ended up doing a show on it around that time, but it became very neutered. Some of the people involved intended to make it much more hard-hitting and hold the gambling companies accountable. Let’s just say the final product didn’t end up doing that.”
Noren, who detailed a family history that included seeing her grandfather, father and brother’s lives unspool due to gambling addiction, left the network in 2023 after ESPN announced the debut of ESPN BET, a partnership with Penn Entertainment.
“I’m not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands,” Noren bluntly told Funt.
When reached for this story, Noren declined to comment further.
ESPN released a statement in response: “ESPN remains committed to journalism that serves sports fans, holds powerful interests accountable and earns our audience’s trust. Our editorial decisions are guided by news judgment and journalistic integrity, and we demonstrate this every day through the award-winning content we produce across our platforms.”
Before he retired in 2019, Bob Ley was the venerable face of Outside the Lines, which included a daily network show with deeply reported TV packages and roundtable discussions on the biggest issues in sports. (Full disclosure: I was a contributor to that show from 2010 to 2017 while working at ESPN.)
“The greatest luxury in television is time and investigative reporting is the feature of a mature news organization,” said Ley, one of the most respected anchors in sports. “It’s not just the box score, it’s the financial pages and the police report.”
He describes Noren as “passionate, honest and indefatigable”. During his tenure at the Worldwide Leader, Ley said, reporters had the leeway to cover entities that had a business relationship with ESPN. If that meant uncovering something unsavory, reporters would have editorial support and ask the subjects of those stories for comment. Sometimes, Ley said, the access even improved those stories.
The network canceled Outside the Lines as a regular show in 2023, although some content is still produced under the brand. A former reporter at the network, who didn’t want to be named since they still work in media, said that the brand is obviously pulling back from investigative journalism, although there are still excellent journalists producing quality work, as ESPN pivots toward entertainment.
Meanwhile Mike Foss, an ESPN executive vice-president, told a conference last week that popular sports personality Pat McAfee “might be a journalist at heart”. “This is a dam-breaking moment,” said Brian Moritz, an associate professor at the Jandoli School of Communication at St Bonaventure University. “What stood out to me: everything that people assumed was happening around sports media is actually happening. To have a former producer at ESPN say it is eye-opening.”
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In 2018, the US supreme court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, allowing states to regulate sports betting markets within their boundaries. Since then, 39 states and Washington DC have established some form of sports betting, although there is wide variation in what is allowed state-to-state. Last April, St Bonaventure and Siena College released the results of a poll showing that 27% of Americans and 52% of men ages 18 to 49 now have an account with a sportsbook.
That’s the same demographic traditionally associated with sports viewership.
“ESPN makes a lot of money from promoting sports gambling,” Moritz said. “And there’s interest in it – a lot of young men want to gamble. But that really makes you ask, what is the mission of ESPN?”
Moritz noted that the rise in sports betting isn’t without cost to those consumers. According to the National Council on Problem Gambling, there has not been a nationwide survey on how addictive sports betting is since the activity became more widely legalized, but the NCPG cited research in recent congressional testimony showing New Jersey, Ohio and Indiana have experienced a rise in problem gambling that tracks with adoption.
“The young, male population that engages in sports fan activity is a Venn diagram with the demographic at risk for a gambling problem,” said Cait Huble, director of public affairs for the NCPG, which is a nonpartisan organization that advocates for harm reduction.
The group is lobbying for the Points Act, which would require a percentage of the federal excise tax on sports bets to be allocated back to the states for prevention, treatment and research into of problem betting.
“What troubles me most is the disconnect at the ESPN executive level between making money and caring about the human impact of constantly bombarding fans with betting odds and talk,” Noren said. “It’s become impossible to escape.”
DraftKings has been ESPN’s official sportsbook and odds provider since 2025. The press release announcing the partnership said the content would be “integrated across ESPN’s ecosystem”. Many ESPN shows and live broadcasts now contain features on betting strategy and updated odds.
“Game coverage is now framed by betting coverage,” said Ley, who now spends his time working with the Seton Hall Center for Sports Media, which he founded. “It’s bigger than just sports, the whole media landscape is being overturned. Even companies as big as ESPN are facing substantial pressures and having to change their business models.”
Being a vocal opponent of a revenue stream is not a route to job security. The Pew Research Center, utilizing Bureau of Labor Statistics data, reported that newsroom jobs declined by 26% between 2008 and 2020. Even the industry giants aren’t immune. The Washington Post, one of the few outlets where sports reporters were still critically covering the betting industry, eliminated its sports department in February.
ESPN has had regular and wide-reaching layoffs every two years or so for the last decade.
“I empathize with people who work at large media companies,” Noren said in the Q&A. “It’s really risky in this landscape to speak out.”
It may seem almost impossible to curtail sports betting’s pull on the sports media landscape given the current White House’s disinterest in regulating business. Congress has made the Protect College Sports Act the legislative priority in the sports space, meaning sports betting and sports prediction markets seem to be on the back burner.
However, the Washington Sun reported this week that the Federal Trade Commission is looking into sports betting, including deceptive advertising by sportsbooks such as FanDuel and DraftKings.
Even if regulation is on the horizon, journalists are under a more immediate constraint: working in an industry that relies on sports betting for a good part of the operating budget.
“These jobs are hard to come by especially if you are younger,” said Moritz, referencing in particular the students he teaches who want to make a name in this industry. “Do you even feel like you can take a stand?”