During the summer of 2010, the New York Knicks were in discussions to try and sign superstar forward LeBron James and pitched him with a 10-minute video that included a segment featuring James Gandolfini and Edie Falco reprising their roles from The Sopranos. The video also contained additional celebrity cameos with an intent to try and persuade James to sign with the organization.
After nearly a decade unseen by the public, the video compilation was obtained by Pablo Torre Finds Out, a digital program from Meadowlark Media in its first year on the air. Segments from the subsequent episode in which the tape was revealed intrigued viewers and quickly went viral, an example of an adaptation in investigative journalism built for digital media.
Although James ended up signing with the Miami Heat and proceeded to win two championships while in south Florida, there had been rumors about the unique manner in which the Knicks pitched him within the process. Torre’s show divulged the idiosyncrasies within the attempted signing, retaining its format as an eclectic, multiplatform consumption experience. The program diverts from the standard paradigm of sports media content and seeks to optimize its credibility to elicit shares of attention from the audience. In turn, the offering is built on the inquisitive nature and varied interests of Torre, who serves as its host, executive producer and managing editor.
“It’s a show where we use journalism to solve mysteries, and using journalism to solve mysteries that are both smart and stupid,” Torre said. “We do serious things stupidly and we do stupid things seriously. That’s how I think about the show – it’s that highbrow, lowbrow dynamic that I’ve learned over the course of my career.”
Torre, in being granted the autonomy to explore his broad interests and intrigues, is able to discover an array of various topics that appeal to him. At the same time, the program utilizes the tenets of journalism and performs significant groundwork and preparation before recording and subsequently publishing new episodes.
“The business proposition of the show is that we do it often enough that it feels like you’re getting it every day,” Torre explained, “and we do it often enough such that it’s not like a short-run prestige, docustyle, narrative podcast series, which I listen to and enjoy as a genre, but isn’t enough, I think, in the modern sports media economy to basically keep a staff employed year round, which is what my show is trying to do.”
Attaining a resemblance to Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, the investigative sports journalism series that recently concluded an award-winning, 29-year run, Torre aspires for his show to uphold the ethics and fundamentals of journalism. The Meadowlark Media show has correspondents of its own, a travel budget, producers and editors dedicated to compiling high-end, quality presentations.
“We’re doing shows about topics that I don’t think Real Sports would ever touch with a 100-foot pole, but that level of ambition and the sort of void that we’re trying to fill in sports media,” Torre explained, “I would say that, yes, exactly, we are trying to be the next evolution of what Real Sports had been for so long and so successfully.”
Torre has a background in investigative journalism, originally earning his way into Sports Illustrated with enterprise reporting as he performed his role as a fact checker. While at Harvard University, he had had aspirations to practice criminal or constitutional law and focused his college experience on amassing expertise in those subject areas. Torre perceived that his critical thinking, argumentative and debate skills would be utilized in the courtroom; instead, he found himself working to earn opportunities and establish himself in sports media at Sports Illustrated upon failing his first LSAT examination.
“I was not going to get assigned a big profile – nobody was going to say to me, ‘Hey, go profile LeBron’ as a fact checker, bottom of the totem pole at Sports Illustrated,” Torre said. “Instead, you need to bring ideas to the table to convince them, our magazine editors, that this was something that was (a) worth doing even though they didn’t know about it; and (b) was something that me, a young person who they didn’t necessarily trust yet, could pull off.”
Torre’s current show with Meadowlark Media draws parallels to the work he completed in print journalism through its docustyle conversations and adherence to journalistic principles. In fact, there are elements of both magazine storytelling and sports talk radio embedded within the program that help render it distinctive from part of its competition.
“If we can give you the element of friends talking to each other while also giving you the payoff of great narrative storytelling, then I think we found something that feels like both the unholy mutant child of those genres, but also [is] something that logically is actually where my interests exist,” Torre said. “I’m somebody who loves both of those things. If you love good stories and you love listening to people shoot the sh*t, then this show logically should also have a long runway of existence before an asteroid hits planet earth.”
Although Torre had appeared on television as a member of Sports Illustrated, it was never a formal part of his job until joining ESPN. Appearing on the air for the first time was “mildly terrifying” for him, but he quickly proved his versatility and aptitude in the craft through appearances on The Sports Reporters. In his first month as an ESPN employee, he tried out for Around the Horn, a show that he asserts changed his life and helped define the direction of his career. Demonstrating subjectivity on the air while using the background of objective reporting was a challenging task in addition to proving his worth.
“Your opinion is being heard by people around the world – it’s broadcast internationally – and so the initial insecurity that I had to overcome was me assuming that everyone’s response would be, ‘Who the f**k is this guy that I have never seen before?,’” Torre recalled, “and that was, for somebody who was in his mid-20s, Asian-American guy who clearly didn’t play professional sports, that was not easy to sort of psychologically be confident and credible enough so that you could feel like you belonged.”
Torre learned more about the intricacies of hosting and sports talk through his appearances on both Highly Questionable and The Dan Le Batard Show with Stugotz while it was on ESPN Radio. Through his experiences, he learned more about how to thrive in the craft, causing him to feel somewhat afraid when Le Batard left ESPN in late 2020 and launched Meadowlark Media alongside former ESPN president John Skipper.
“It felt in its own way inevitable because by that point, Dan wanted very clearly his freedom to say and do whatever he wanted,” Torre said, “and he’d also built this audience – which I am in awe of still – this massive audience of arguably unhinged superfans that he knew would follow him because he had earned their trust even if he were to leave ESPN.”
Early in the process, Torre thought that he needed to find a way to join Meadowlark Media because of the value proposition the business presented and the changing nature of the industry. A few years later, he achieved this goal while continuing to remain as a contributor to both Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption on ESPN. Being afforded the freedom to work for both companies, Torre believes, is something that “trickles down from the top,” referencing Stephen A. Smith and Ryan Clark as examples in this regard.
Torre launched the program, Pablo Torre Finds Out, last September and has amassed an audience of consumers across several distribution platforms. Compiling a high-quality show three times per week requires extensive planning, dedication and execution, all with a level of consistency in creating new content.
“I’m always looking for another angle in on a big story, and that’s where my curiosity is sort of like a metal detector of like, ‘Is there comedy where there seems to be only scolding? Is there seriousness where there seems to be only jokes?,’” Torre said, “and so to me, the perfect story is able to engage with the news cycle while also really being about something deeper or bigger.”
In addition to his eponymous project, Torre co-hosts The Sporting Class podcast alongside John Skipper and David Samson, two sports business executives with vast experience in different corners of the industry. Skipper is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Meadowlark Media after working for ESPN as its president, while Samson is the former president of the Miami Marlins and current host of the Nothing Personal podcast.
Throughout the last year, the show has discussed a variety of industry topics, including NBA media rights negotiations, Venu Sports and the involvement of private equity within college sports. The discussions usually contain both tension and conflict through their contrasting viewpoints, leading to the revelation of different insights and frames of reference.
“I love hosting The Sporting Class so much, and I refer to it all the time as ‘Rich guys’ OnlyFans’ because really what it is is I’m wildly curious about what it’s like to be them and have their perspective on a business that is changing so chaotically and rapidly really hour to hour,” Torre said. “We’re watching billion-dollar swings happen regularly, executives change employers and just sports emerge seemingly out of nowhere, and so, so much of sports right now is a business story, and my genuine curiosity also applies to, ‘What’s actually going on here?’”
For Torre, being able to develop his own projects and working with colleagues he had known made assimilating into Meadowlark Media a facile task and granted him a feeling of trust. Between Le Batard and Skipper, he has people in whom he can both confer in and collaborate on a variety of different shows. Through the process, Torre has found a way to preserve the feeling of curiosity, excitement and pride that people feel through watching the programming, something that energizes him on a daily basis to leverage his astute outlook on content selection and editorial direction.
“It’s not simply that, ‘I like this thing, and I’m going to shove it down your throat even though you’re really interested in this other story happening,’” Torre explained. “I’m going to explain why it is that right now is the right time for us to be talking about it, and that to me is the lesson of a great magazine.”
Derek Futterman is a contributing editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. Additionally, he has worked in a broad array of roles in multimedia production – including on live game broadcasts and audiovisual platforms – and in digital content development and management. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. To get in touch, find him on X @derekfutterman.
