Ariel Helwani leaves Vox Media and where does that leave the fans?

I've been waiting eight years to comment on some of this crap. Now's the time.

The news that Ariel Helwani is leaving The MMA Hour and MMAFighting.com for the second time broke yesterday.

This kind of presents a shit-or-get-off-the-pot moment for me as I’ve been holding some things back regarding Ariel for eight years. Hell, make that thirteen years and I might as well get them out there.

First up, this isn’t hating or jealousy. Ariel has earned his success and I would certainly never want to trade places with him — largely because I’ve already had more than enough MMA people in my life. I can’t imagine dealing with the volume of scumbaggery that Ariel has had to deal with.

My goal here, however, is to address a couple of issues of journalistic practice that I was not allowed to address in either 2011 or 2016 publicly or privately with Ariel and the management at Vox Media — where I was employed for many years.

I also want to address some of Vox’s business practices that were confirmed by Ariel in 2016. A peek behind the curtain, if you will.

To repeat, I have no personal issues with Ariel but I do have issues with the modern practice of sports journalism. I certainly have personal and philosophical issues with Vox Media management in terms of how they betrayed the concept of community sports blogging and still didn’t make anyone rich.

Read on if you want to know how Vox Media’s poor business practices contributed to that degeneration and why everyone who truly cares about the sport of MMA is worse off now than we were just a few short years ago when the MMA media space was relatively functional.