Burning Thoughts: Nicole Noren leaves ESPN over their embrace of sports gambling

So now, onto the story of the week, last Wednesday, October 14th, a Q&A with Nicole Nolan published at the Columbia Journalism Review.

It was written by Danny Font, a recent guest here on Burn It All Down, and he's also the author of Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling, so there was really no one better to do this interview with her.

In the piece, for the first time, Nolan talked about why she left ESPN after 24 years and a bevy of awards.

This woman won Emmys, Murrows, Peabodies, mainly for her work on Outside the Lines.

So when Danny asked Nicole why she finally left ESPN, she told him, quote, "For so many years, there was a really strict line in the sand when it came to sports betting.

Then the tide slowly began turning internally.

It was very troubling for me to see the normalization of betting and ESPN's complete acceptance of that.

And finally, they just decided to go all in.

It worried me.

I knew what gambling addiction could do to families.

My grandfather, my father, and one of my brothers were pretty much destroyed by sports gambling addiction." Whew.

Okay, so that was a lot of me talking.

First, I just wanna start by saying, like, we are in solidarity with Nicole.

This is an incredible, hard, brave thing that she has done.

Right, Shireen? [laughs]

Absolutely, and I, I do wanna point out, uh, thank you so much, Jess, for the work you did with Danny Font.

Like, following him has been so instructive for me.

I've, I taught that episode in my class, of you speaking-

Oh

... with him, what he talks about.

And one of the things that is so frustrating about working in sport media is the way that gambling has been normalized.

So the fact that Nicole, and 100% in solidarity with her, also a woman stepping aside and showing this kind of courage.

I mean, I'm not surprised it's actually a woman doing this kind of work, 'cause, like, most of the labor falls us, on, on us anyway.

But for her to do this and be vulnerable and share that, I think that there are so many elements of this that are so important and so relevant in why it's such an important story, and why not a lot of outlets are following up on this-

Mm