Even if you didn’t listen to the episode of Pablo Torre Finds out from May 9, you probably know about it.

You know about it because it was where the story broke that the University of North Carolina had banned Jordon Hudson, girlfriend of new Tar Heels coach Bill Belichick, had been banned from the school’s practice facilities. UNC denied the story, the latest chapter of what has been a categorically weird story over the past few months.  

The entire episode is worth a listen. Along with being funny and compelling (we’ll get to this in a bit), it was also deeply reported.

But more than the specific information reported, it’s the approach that Torre took in this episode that leads to a compelling journalism discussion. 

Off the jump, let’s establish that this is a tricky story to write about. 

Belichick is 73 and famously reticent around the media and dismissive of social media. Hudson is 24, very much of the influencer era and who, Torre reported, is looking to develop a reality TV show about her and Belichick.  

The age difference makes it easy to make fun of the couple, to cast aspersions on Hudson’s motives. Even calling her a potential influencer and reality TV star feels off, as those careers have a vapid connotation. This story also feels teetering on the edge of the gold digger caricature, which this episode of You’re Wrong About expertly breaks down. 

He is the head coach of a massive football program. He has a lot of power, and now Hudson has a lot of power: she’s very involved at UNC, despite not being hired by the university — she’s like the Elon Musk of college football.

A lot of people are relying on Belichick. People at UNC have jobs because of him (including his son), and student athletes and their parents are trusting him to guide their college careers. A lot of these kids hope to play in the NFL. If I were an athlete, or a parent of one, I would be concerned that the man who is supposed to be in charge of my or my child’s future can’t even control his own public image.

From a media perspective —especially in an age when we’re wondering how much teams and athletes need independent coverage —  Wilder noted an interesting point about the CBS This Morning interview which brought this story to a mainstream audience (emphasis added): 

I think this interview popped off because Belichick and Hudson have rarely been featured on a platform they don’t control since they started dating. CBS owed them nothing, Hudson behaved badly, and they paid the price for it.

Back to the podcast.

The episode featured Torre, Katie Nolan and Michael Cruz Kayne in a roundtable format. Torre discussed what he found out in his reporting, and Nolan and Kayne reacted in real time. The point of the episode was not just to report the news, but to report and react to the news. To break the story and immediately talk about it. 

It’s an entertaining hour. And an interesting way to conceive of journalism. 

In a Substack post a few days later, Torre compared the journalism he’s doing on his podcast to, of all things, YouTube unboxing videos. 

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.

If I have a quibble, it’s the point about journalism being video/audio, not print. Not just because I’m an old man and a writer, but because I think all of us in journalism have spent too much time and gotten too bogged down over the past 15 years in debating delivery methods. Written work, video, podcast, data visualization, Instagram gallery, TikTok video. It matters, but it also doesn’t. 

What’s more interesting to me is the idea of journalism as an unboxing video. The energy in this episode was less “here is the reporting I’ve done on this story” and much more “You GUYS!1 You won’t believe what I’ve found out about this.” 

It reminded me of the first season of Serial. 

The first episode of Serial dropped on Oct. 3, 2014. Yes, that’s almost 11 full years ago. Yes we are all old. 

The underlying premise of that first season was that this was a story presented and reported week to week. The real time reporting and production was a feature, not a bug. 

That energy is what drove the first season. For all of its faults2, the first few episodes of Serial’s first season hold up. And what does so is the propulsive energy of Sarah Koenig’s reporting. That was the secret of Serial’s success. The vibe of each episode that season was very much “You GUYS! You will not believe what I found out this week. Here it is …” 

The first season of Serial was not the story of Adnan Sayed’s potentially wrongful conviction. It was the story of Sarah Koenig’s journey investigating Adnan Sayed’s poentailly wronngful conviction. That made all the difference. 

It’s the same vibe I felt listening to Pablo Torre tell Katie Nolan and Michael Cruz Kane all the stuff he found out about Jordon Hudons and Bill Belichick. 

In his Substack, Torre quoted a Tweet from Matthew Zeitlin: 

Any “future of journalism” makes me hesitate. I’ve heard too much of it over the past 15 years. Inherent in any talk like this is the implicit suggestion that what’s being proposed as the future of journalism will save journalism, and I’ve seen too many pivots to video and future of journalism discussions over the years and have learned just enough media economics to know it’s way more complicated than that. 

I do think that episodes like this pone of Pablo Torre Finds Out, the first season of Serial, and the way the former echoes the later, can be instructive. It’s a reminder that there is not one form of journalism that matters. It’s a reminder that there’s not one approach to journalism that can work. Not every story would work with a “You GUYS” vibe, and that could quickly turn into pandering. But done well, and used appropriately, it’s an effective way to tell a story and bring an audience along with you. 

It’s a reminder that journalism is not, and should never be, considered first and foremost a product. It’s an approach to seeing and explaining the world.