A journalistic reunion with my ol' friend Dana White
The backstory behind today's $7.7 billion news break
Hey friends and followers,
Apologies on missing yet another Tuesday edition. I find myself feeling sick after two weeks of constant travel and am getting some rest tonight.
Instead I thought I’d share a little behind-the-scenes story of what I was working on today in my day job, covering media and entertainment at Forbes.
Dana White On How UFC Landed Its Blockbuster $7.7 Billion Streaming Deal With Paramount
UFC's CEO reveals why he wanted David Ellison's muscle behind his MMA giant, why pay-per-view events no longer work, and what a potential UFC fight at the White House would look like on CBS.
The backstory begins almost a year ago, when I began working on a story about the UFC hosting the first-ever sporting event at the Sphere. During a simple phone interview with UFC CEO Dana White, he surprised me (and the company’s PR person) by inviting me out to Las Vegas to tour a war room he had built to map out the event. I flew out for the day on a whim, got the full tour, and eventually wrote a story I thought turned out pretty well.
Flash forward a few months to November when Trump won the presidential election. Our newsroom was tasked with coming up with stories on anyone in Trump’s orbit who also fell within Forbes’ purview. I pitched Dana White, and after three wild days shadowing him back in Las Vegas eventually wrote a profile that became my first cover story for the magazine.
From that very first phone conversation, I had been angling for position to break the news of the fighting promotion’s next media rights deal, which promised to be a multibillion-dollar blockbuster. It would be a huge scoop for any journalist.
(I even covered the news of his Power Slap venture’s new media arrangement…the kind of source-building story that journalists have used for decades to angle for the big fish.)
Considering Forbes’ stature in the marketplace, I’m not sure we ever competed for the news break. But at 5 a.m. this morning I was told by UFC’s PR team that I could speak with White at noon—the first journalist to be granted an interview.
The rest of the day was a mad scramble of research, reporting and writing. By 2:30 p.m. I had turned in my story, and an hour later it was live online. The result wasn’t brilliant or ground-breaking, but it was solid. A definite win.
In a cruel twist of internet irony, the news cycle seemed to have exhausted itself by then, or perhaps the appetite for White’s words on the deal were not as strong as we had initially thought. Or, who knows, maybe the headline was wrong or the photo or a million other things. Regardless, the story mostly flopped.
It’s a reminder that these days there’s such a disconnect between a journalist’s work and its reception. The time taken to put together a thoughtful story may not be rewarded in any tangible way, depending on whether the algorithm shines its fickle light on the link instead of the dozens of videos, opinions, blogs and commentary. Taking consumer demand into account, it may even be time wasted. (If 1,000 original reported words fall in the forest, but nobody hears them…)
Still, ideologically, I believe in the mission of journalists to uncover new truth and ideas. And practically, I stand by my ongoing coverage of this corner of the media beat.
And, let’s not forget…it’s still a pretty darn cool job.
See you on Friday to talk Weapons!
Matt