Access is Everything…Until it Costs Everything
The Dianna Russini story is what happens when a system built on blurred lines needs someone to pay for them, and who that someone always turns out to be
We live in a world where access is everything. This is particularly true in sports, where insiders are the most visible and coveted figures in the industry. A few photos were all it took to cost Dianna Russini her access and her job at The Athletic. In the wake of Page Six publishing photos of her and New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel at a resort in Arizona, Russini has resigned from the outlet amid speculation that they were having an affair. Vrabel, meanwhile, has had no repercussions as the Patriots have shielded their coach from media scrutiny on the subject—an indication of the power dynamics at play.
League insiders are often some of the most followed journalists today, because they break stories. This sometimes comes with crossing a line, and Russini is far from the first to get caught doing it. In 2021, it was found that ESPN NFL insider Adam Schefter had sent a story for copy approval to Bruce Allen, team president of the Washington Commanders, going as far as calling him “Mr. Editor”—a huge journalistic integrity red flag.
Both Russini’s and Schefter’s actions cross the line of being unethical, but they present a reality about the position. Access-based roles rely on relationships and the management of those relationships more than anything else. Increasingly they have boundaries that are loosely defined, with consequences that never seem to be equal.
The Realities in the Field
For a number of years I worked for a variety of marketing companies as a field sales representative. The job usually entailed visiting a variety of retail establishments representing one of our clients. I have represented Samsung, LG, Google, and Motorola over the years. While the primary function of those jobs was to train staff and help to drive sales, there was another element that was incredibly important: gaining competitive intelligence, which makes it more like being an insider for a media network than most may realize.
The benefit for a Google or Samsung of having a group of people visiting stores is that they get a sense of the pulse on the ground floor. It’s a way to see what’s really happening at the store level and cuts through any platitudes that C-suite executives give them in reporting data. Consider this example. Samsung may hear that Apple is planning a new display that emphasizes the sale of a particular model. This is important information for Samsung from a merchandising planning perspective. The way they verify this is to deploy their group of field representatives to talk to store personnel and verify the accuracy of what they heard.
Employees at retailers won’t just give this information away, however. That’s why cultivating relationships is often the most important part of the job. The most successful reps were not the ones with extensive product knowledge, but rather the ones who had leveraged their relationships to help drive sales. If they had cultivated a strong bond with leadership on the sales floor, this meant that those managers would consider featuring the reps’ devices at a higher rate. The staffs of those stores would also be more likely to sell those products at the behest of their leadership team—it was in essence a trickle-down effect.
Building these relationships often took time, especially at a retailer like Best Buy which has a well-defined culture that values the prestige of the brand (for the most part). There is a delineation in Best Buy between the blue shirts (Best Buy employees) and the 3PL (third-party labor) reps that enter their stores. There was a culture there, and reps were often viewed as outsiders—much how teams and league’s view journalists and the media.
What often occurred to break down these walls was to avoid initially talking about anything product related. Instead, small talk and ice breakers were taught to have staff open up. By gauging their interests and discussing them, you have an opportunity for them to see you as a friend as opposed to a nuisance that’s there to force them to sell a product. It’s important to remember that over the course of a week, a store employee may be talked to by a rep upwards of 10 times. In my time in the field, I found that music, sports, food, and video games were solid foundational pieces to build relationships off of to differentiate from the other reps vying for attention.
This ultimately led to a bit of line blurring. A strong enough relationship would lead to integration in a social calendar. You are viewed as one of them, being invited to holiday parties, bar nights, game nights, and so on. At times, this leads to romantic entanglements as well, since there is such a blurring between the professional and the personal. I have encountered countless instances where a rep started dating an employee at a big box store or a carrier. Some led to strong fruitful marriages, while others led to disaster.
This was all well and good when there wasn’t any issues or friction. But when things turn bad— a failed romantic fling or an off-color comment on the sales floor—then repercussions occurred. The line often used in the rep world is that a rep is always a guest in the house, regardless of how much time they spend there. That means that the rules for the rep are much stricter than the employee of the retailer. Any sort of impropriety that was reported would often lead to either the termination or relocation of the rep—whereas the retail employee remained largely unscathed.
Relationship-building thus became a double-edged sword. It was incredibly important in creating value for the rep, but it could also lead to their demise as well. Much like insiders, the access is everything until a cost must be paid.
Shifting Standards
My experience in field retail work preconditioned me to expect a resignation or termination of Russini’s contract. As someone that had to infiltrate a larger institution, I saw this song and dance before. While the consequences for Russini versus the lack of them for Vrabel have a clear sexist lens, they are also two entities that are not operating under the same framework.
Former Sports Illustrated writer Jeff Pearlman, who often discusses the state of modern journalism on TikTok, has long had a clear distinction that journalists need to have about the figures that they cover. Pearlman insists that they are your subjects, not your friends. His stance comes from the journalistic code of ethics that dictates reporting accuracy, full transparency, refusing gifts, and avoiding conflicts of interest.
These ethics are not legally enforced, but rather a credo that most journalists adhere to. That code doesn’t apply to coaches as much, especially those who win. Consider that in the world of sports, teams will employ people that have nefarious pasts if they can perform on the field or in the boardroom. We saw this recently with NBA guard Jaden Ivey. After he went on a religious rant on Instagram he was let go. Not only because of what he said, but because he said it while being a dispensable talent. Had he been an All-Star, it’s fair to wonder if his situation would have been handled differently.
Where this comes into conflict for anyone in an access-based role is that access is created through relationship building. That relationship building can very quickly lead into conflicts of interest because we are talking about human emotions after all. When your entire job is to find out the inner workings of teams in an entity that has a culture of secrecy from the ownership level down, crossing the personal line feels inevitable on some level.
Journalists, because they need to be able to pry information from sources, are often well trained in relationship building and have a feel for saying the right things to get access. When they get a story, they are celebrated, talked about, and the focal point of attention for many sports fans. But when these sorts of stories surface, there is some inevitable pearl clutching, wondering just how they got their access.
Building trust is often a messy game. Getting people to believe in your ability to keep their inner thoughts secure takes a bit of give and take, to run stories that are favorable to them. This creates a bit of connective tissue between reporter and subject, which has been magnified by the prevalence of an always-connected society.
The Digital Wall Breakdown
Think about how easy it is for someone to reach you right now. You likely have a smartphone; it’s always on and connected. A person could call you, text you, reach you via social media, or email you. It has never been easier to get a hold of someone. While these tools increase connectivity and communication potential, they also blur the lines between personal and professional lives.
This is a departure from the past, where work was often left at work. Now people can log on and check in whenever, which opens up a myriad of issues. In the sports world, a reporter could cover their subject and go about their day into their personal life. But with the smartphone and social media, a reporter is always on. And this is especially true for a journalist that relies on access.
Reporters are very active on social media, often posting their scoops and stories for the masses to consume. Their subjects are also online, allowing them to interact and reach one another in a way that was never possible before. These social interactions often dispose of the pleasantries and can feel reactionary and emotional in nature.
The end result of that is a coach or player messaging a reporter directly, which is a vine that can twist in any number of directions. Crossing that line fully dispenses with any separation between personal and professional lives, which can lead to journalistic ethical violations as a baseline. Consider this, a coach or a player is drunk and sends an inappropriate or damaging text message. There is a tension for the reporter to go along with it because they don’t want to burn their source. Even in this situation, the journalist is the one that comes out looking poorly, all because they were more accessible than in the past.
Social media and easy access via smartphones blur the lines even further, opening journalists to be contacted at any time which creates the potential erosion of the line and opens up all manner of relations between reporter and subject. The easy access and communication blur the relational lines even further, and in a system that benefits from that blurring, no one is any hurry to redraw them.
A Product of Ambiguity
On some deep level, we seem to relish the dramatic. One of the reasons that reality TV rose to prominence was because it was more cost effective to produce. But what gave it staying power is that we as a viewing public were fixated at the real-life happenings and emotions that was meant to be unscripted. In sports media, the same thirst for drama applies.
There are websites and podcasts dedicated specifically to covering things that sports media figures say, because for whatever reason we can’t get enough of it. Look no further than the rise of Stephen A. Smith as a viral quote machine as proof of this.
The sports media personality becoming the story then becomes part of the theater of the leagues. It’s not just rivalries on the court, but also the war of words off of it. Insiders have been in this bit for years, many of them often carrying water for players that they have built relationships with.
In that sense, Dianna Russini is a tragic figure. The noise of the allegations so loud that it leads to her resigning, while there is not a word coming from the Patriots about Vrabel. Adam Schefter when he made his Mr. Editor comment received only backlash, but his employment wasn’t ever in doubt. I can’t help but think of Russini as the rep that proverbially flew a little too close to the sun and was burned as a result. While Vrabel, ever insulated by the league, can move forward with little to no recompense.
The institution will always prevail, journalists are ultimately viewed as pawns on the chessboard, much as 3PL reps are viewed in the context of big box retail. As there is an ever-growing demand for access journalism this line blurring will continue to happen, which is exactly what everyone, quietly, is counting on.