The NYT celebrates Dana White's victory lap and misses the story of UFC 300

Or what happens when America's most influential media outfit kills its sports department

Out of all the crap I pulled in 16 years of running Bloody Elbow, finding creative talent and loosing them on the MMA world was the thing I did best.

From the day in early 2007 that I realized I had no idea how to run an MMA blog and found Luke Thomas to run Bloody Elbow (after having been turned down by Zach Arnold and Dan Stupp) I had incredible luck with talent spotting.

Out of all the creators I hired at BE, none had “future media star” written all over him from day one like Karim Zidan. The kid was multi-lingual, working in the Russian MMA business and reporting back on the things he learned there.

And shit was shocking.

Karim didn’t flinch and reported on some of the most dangerous people on the planet and their unsavory MMA connections (seriously, Vox Media wanted to send Karim to Vegas to attend the MMA Awards and the security costs were prohibitive for the liability-conscious but well-funded corporate citizen.)

Eventually, Karim’s work on Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov got him featured on HBO’s Real Sports and soon he was moonlighting at class outfits like The Guardian and The New York Times.

When we went independent I couldn’t afford Karim but wasn’t worried about him because I knew he was working on some BIG TIME shit at the Times. He eventually got a fucking cover story. On the NY Times.

I thought dude was set.

Then the Old Gray Lady went and killed their sports division and there went that. I’ll let Karim tell the story:

An obituary for NYT Sports

on Monday, July 10, The New York Times announced that it was dismantling its sports desk, which has more than 35 journalists and editors. The news organization will instead rely on sports coverage from The Athletic, a website it bought 18 months ago for $550 million and whose staff is made up entirely of nonunion workers. While The Times’s executive editors called it an “evolution in how we cover sports,” it felt more like the end of an era, and sudden demise of the last bastion of sports journalism.

The journalists and editors previously assigned to the sports desk, some of whom I have worked with, will reportedly move to other roles in the newsroom, raising further questions about their future, as well as that of their important work on how sports interacts with society at large.

On a more personal note, it also shattered my dreams of becoming a sports journalist for The Times.

The reason I’m talking about this irrelevant ancient history is because one of the brightest spots in an amazing UFC 300 weekend was the incredible press Dana White and the UFC got in The New York Times.

It was the kind of coverage I was taught to call “a blowjob” when I worked in corporate public affairs in the 90s.

Seriously, the two fucking articles are the kind of PR that any publicly traded (or formerly publicly traded) corporation is only too happy to “earn.”

The first piece avoided explicitly indulging in the dreaded Zuffa Myth but came damn close. But otherwise, it was a stale retelling of how the UFC was saved by the decision to pay-to-play to get a reality show on Spike TV that has no apparent current news value.

Rather than document the snoozy atrocities in the piece, I’ll refute it thus:

Via X

The second piece was a doozy.

It’s the kind of coverage the Times has historically grudgingly given to newly elected presidents it had opposed. A kind of "ok ok we surrender, you’re the boss now” story which makes me wonder if someone at the Times isn’t writing off Biden’s reelection chances a little early.

The part that got to me the most was the upselling of Dana White and the downplaying of his boss, Ari Emanuel. Check this shit:

WTF? Did they actually describe Endeavor — the company that paid $4 billion for an acquisition that most certainly did NOT leave Dana White in charge) — as “a key business partner?”