2016, the year I learned I wasn’t alone (professionally)

In 2016 I learned to love lawyers — not the entire profession, of course, or even most of its practitioners, but a pair from (the late) Gawker Media.

I spent the second half of 2015 and the first of 2016 on a single feature for Deadspin (then Gawker-owned), often at the expense of other assignments, so intense was my appetite for telling this story. I was investigating the sports-betting pick-selling industry, a barely quasi-legal business populated by men who promise big returns if you pay for their gambling advice. But I had spent my life around gamblers, and I learned at a young age that if a sports bettor had an advantage, he would guard it. He would have everything to lose — quite literally — by advertising it.

Yet, as I began looking into the most visible of these so-called touts, his life story venerated in the pages of the New York Times Magazine, his betting advice broadcast to millions on ESPN, I grew appalled by the mainstream media’s complete lack of skepticism in vetting him and his colleagues. What’s more, I knew I’d be charting rough waters as the story neared publication, since I’d be reporting that many peddlers in this industry enjoy secretive arrangements with offshore sportsbooks in which they earn a significant cut of the losses of their referred clients.

I submitted my first draft in early December (that’s 2015); then, after months of adding to it as events continued to unfold, there followed regular correspondences with my untiring editor, sharpening the copy, sourcing every claim in this layered piece, and finally going through it, line by line, with him and these lawyers.

My impression of media lawyers, based on past experience, was of excessive caution and risk-aversion. But in this case, they were determined and unwavering; they studied an opaque business, they followed its timeline, they held firm to exposing unwelcome truths. Later, after the subject of the piece promised to ruin my reputation, end my career, and sue me, they responded to his demand for an apology and a retraction:

Threatening an individual reporter, operating independently, with the prospect of becoming a personal defendant in a lawsuit is a grave thing to do. Mr. Goldberg professionally reported an in-depth, investigative article about an unregulated industry that operates on the fringes of gambling, and repeatedly asked your client to come forward and speak for himself. Threatening Mr. Goldberg personally is unnecessary and unjustified, and your action has the broader effect of deterring investigative journalism, particularly that undertaken by independent journalists who have the passion and freedom to doggedly pursue stories traditional outlets may not cover.

I’m going on my ninth year as an independent journalist, a road that at times has felt as potholed as the BQE. Reading that, I felt vindicated. I’ve never been all that prolific, often foregoing quick-hitters for big, unwieldy investigations that I’ve been told are as endangered as the whooping crane. This sometimes feels foolhardy, lonely, and judging by the threats I faced, intimidating. It also dooms me to pauperdom. Still, I wouldn’t trade the deep reporting and even the endless revisions this story prompted. I never felt more excited about a piece I had written, and I looked at my computer screen in disbelief when “How America’s Favorite Sports Betting Expert Turned A Sucker’s Game Into An Industry” finally went up on June 23.

It was a charge of satisfaction, relief, fear, exhaustion — something I don’t get to experience too often because of my infrequent output. I knew more threats would follow, as they did, but they were overshadowed by an overwhelmingly enthusiastic response. The fear soon abated, too, because I knew I had editors and lawyers (and, through a side door, even a bankruptcy judge) who were willing to back me up.