How We Investigated Jordon

EPISODE 238: Eleven sources, herbs, and spices.

According to the conventional precepts of sports media, it’s not ideal to release an episode that has nothing to do with the NBA in the midst of an incredible run of NBA playoff games.

But I woke up on Monday morning and saw this:

It’s been a couple days since PTFO published our exhaustive investigation into Jordon Hudson and Bill Belichick’s relationship, which may sound extraordinarily gossipy for, uh, the only sports podcast with a Peabody nomination and an Edward R. Murrow Award.

But anyone who knows me knows that I love taking stupid things seriously.

And that the most important question isn’t what you’re examining, but how.

My reporting started way back in February, when PTFO broke the story of how Jordon Hudson had been secretly operating as her boyfriend’s agent/momager, to the point of insinuating herself into a Super Bowl commercial — the paragon of American branding! — with a stunned Matt Damon and Ben Affleck.

And at that point, what I began to suspect is that this whole thing isn’t really a story about an age-gap relationship.

It’s a story about power.

And I started finding person after person who had to deal with both Jordon and Bill — at length, firsthand, amid this strange phase in the life of the greatest coach in football history — who agreed.

The question then became how to break the information I’d been gathering. And something I’ve been thinking very hard about, since launching PTFO less than two years ago, is a YouTube genre known as the unboxing video.

The basic premise of the unboxing video is so simple that the what, most often, is literal children’s toys. But what makes the premise so darkly effective, to me, is the clear human pleasure of watching someone else react to an authentic surprise.

So I started thinking about how this lesson could now apply to the conventional precepts of journalism, in general. I got here by climbing the ladder of print magazines, starting off as a fact-checker at Sports Illustrated. And that pleasure of surprise, I realized, felt more than familiar. Because what is opening a genuinely great magazine if not unboxing a package of stories?

But the issue, here in the 2020s, is that journalism means video/audio. Not print.

Which is why my approach, while building PTFO, has instead been to build the digital evolution of a television (news magazine) show. Where we teach our staff to turn video/audio conversations into mystery boxes: full of original, serious, high-value reporting… that then gets presented to recurring Friends of PTFO — like Katie Nolan and Michael Cruz Kayne — who then get to play with the news.

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So it’s cool that people out there keep discovering us. And noticing:

Another recent example of this approach, by the way, was our investigation into FBI director Kash Patel and Wayne Gretzky, last month:

And another involved the late James Gandolfini, LeBron James, Donald Trump, and (significantly) more:

Anyway.

I apologize for all the meta commentary about the how, instead of the what.

But that’s why I’d like you to open the box.

YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Big Hugs,

Pablo