Joel Anderson says BuzzFeed spent a month trying to pull Adrian Wojnarowski into its orbit in the fall of 2013, when Ben Smith asked whether he knew the veteran NBA reporter and then pressed him to help make contact. The pitch was unusual even by the standards of a company still finding its shape: Wojnarowski would not even have to write, only tweet breaking news and send readers to BuzzFeed News.
Anderson arrived at BuzzFeed that fall expecting to be a senior sports writer and, as he put it, learn how to make GIFs. Within six months, BuzzFeed's sports vertical was gone. Around that same stretch, Smith kept returning to one sports name and one idea — the value of a reporter who could move news fast on Twitter.
Anderson said the interest never extended much beyond that. “I was like, this is the only time that Ben Smith has been really interested in any sport story, any aspect of sports coverage,” he said. “He only cares about breaking the news.”
That was the logic behind the effort. BuzzFeed News wanted Wojnarowski’s feed as a breaking-news engine, not as a traditional column or beat. He talked to the company, but he never came in for a meeting, and nothing materialized.
The episode now reads like an early marker of a shift that would reshape sports media: breaking news on Twitter becoming the commodity everyone chased. On April 15, 2026, Bryan Curtis posted about Anderson's account on X, bringing the old BuzzFeed pitch back into view. What mattered most about the attempt was not that it failed, but that it showed how early publishers had already begun treating a reporter's tweets as the product itself.
