How Derek Jeter Got Pro Athletes Into Personal Essays

When Derek Jeter retired from baseball in fall 2014, he set out to help other athletes do something that he never could: appear human to fans. “I’m not a robot,” he wrote in the opening dispatch of the Players' Tribune, the website he co-founded to give athletes a platform that didn't rely on beat writers, columnists, or TV cameras. “We just need to be sure our thoughts will come across the way we intend,” the New York Yankees star wrote of his new venture. The Players' Tribune, like many media startups, arrived with plenty of rhetoric about disruption.

At a panel this month on the future of sports journalism at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the program promised an explanation of just how athletes had "completely disrupted the process by taking the story-telling into their own hands." Jaymee Messler, a former sports marketing executive and co-founder of the Players' Tribune, shared the stage with four sportswriters who had all spent time holding recorders in front of ballplayers. Yes, the journalists agreed, the Tribune and outlets like it had made it harder to get access to players. But this would hardly be the end of sportswriting as we know it. "This is just sort of the logical evolution of controlling a printing press not being a very important power any more," said Carl Bialik, a writer at FiveThirtyEight who spoke alongside Messler. For him and the others on stage, the Tribune had already become just another place to read about sports online.