Bomani Jones says modern media landscape makes it difficult to give career advice

Credit: The Young Man and the three

After starting at ESPN as a columnist in 2004, Bomani Jones became one of the top voices in sports media, contributing regularly on Around the Horn and Outside the Lines before leaving the network in 2023.

X, formerly Twitter, was instrumental in helping Jones build his following and audience, and today he has over 530,000 followers on the platform. However, he’s not sure how someone hoping to break into sports media should go about building a following today.

In an appearance on the podcast The Young Man and the Three alongside New Orleans Pelicans forward Trey Murphy III and comedian Adam Friedland, Jones lamented not being able to give advice to aspiring talent on how to succeed in the current landscape.

“It breaks my heart,” Jones said of not knowing what advice to give people looking to build a career in the industry.

“I literally can’t tell them anything,” he added. “Like I’ve told people: ‘Stop sending people to me.’

“I have no idea what the answer is. I don’t know what the industry is going to do… I can’t imagine trying to break a new podcast at this point. I don’t know how any of this runs. I’m just trying to hold onto the people that I’ve got, forget about trying to get bigger, I’m trying to hold onto what I’ve got. And it breaks my heart, because I was able to change my life in a lot of ways by doing this job.

“And it’s not even that I can’t recommend to you that you do it, if you want to do it, that’s fine. I just can’t tell you anything about how you’re supposed to make it.”

Jones and Friedland also touched on how the internet’s algorithms prioritize negative content.

“The internet used to be funny,” Friedland said. “It would make you laugh, you’d be happy. Now, it’s just like yelling at the President.”

“It’s where people go to be unhappy. What catches on the internet is unhappiness,” Jones said.

“I made it explicit and said it out loud: ‘I am going to make my content about things we love and the people that we love and go around that,’ and I am not convinced that that has been good for business.”

This isn’t Jones’s first time acknowledging how different things are from when he broke out 15 years ago. In April, he appeared on and spoke about how social media algorithms have made it all but impossible for young journalists to follow his career path. In a content ecosystem that promotes AI and continues to devalue the work and craft of human writing, the advice Jones finally settled on was to focus on standing out for being excellent in your work.