Ink and you’ll miss it: How boxing journalism has changed

Circa my first day as a member of the boxing media, boxing aired regularly in the U.S. on two premium-cable channels (HBO and Showtime) and three basic-cable channels (USA, ESPN and Fox Sports) and occasionally on two over-the-air networks (CBS and ABC).

Circa the day this article is published, in the wake of the final show of ESPN’s deal with Top Rank, boxing is not airing regularly, or even irregularly, on any channel included in any American’s cable package.

Nevertheless, thanks to streaming services and the internet, boxing fans have access to more fights than they ever have before.

Is this better? Is this worse?

All I can say for sure is it’s different.

As it should be — one expects the state of play to change significantly in any sector over the course of 28 years.

ESPN’s exit (at least for now) from the sport of boxing strikes me as a worthwhile moment for reflection — as does a certain milestone birthday I celebrated Wednesday, reaching a number that rhymes with “nifty” and seems to have caused the AARP to take an interest in me.

It makes for a fine moment to contemplate the ways in which the boxing journalism world of 2025 hardly resembles the boxing journalism world I first encountered in 1997.

The sporting product seen between the bells and between the ropes is still largely recognizable — sure, there are a lot more skilled female boxers and a whole lot more tattoos, but for the most part, boxing is boxing. Nobody has invented a new way to throw a jab, and there isn’t now a trap door in the ring that fighters have to navigate around.

But the way we cover the sport? Who’s covering it? What forms that coverage takes? The access to the subjects? It’s all wildly different from how it was on September 2, 1997, when I sat down at my desk in a basement office in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, for my first day as an associate editor of The Ring magazine.

Pardon the appearance here of Captain Obvious, but most of what has changed has a little something to do with the internet.

In 1997, it existed, but I didn’t know anybody writing on it. We didn’t consult with boxing websites to check facts or gather news. We didn’t even have individual email addresses at The Ring — just one group email that we would dial up (I can still hear that awful screech echoing through the office) to check once daily. Some of our freelance writers still filed via fax machine. Yes, really.

Our product was print. And if you think if you think it’s antiquated that newspaper writers back then would file deadline boxing copy for the morning edition that readers wouldn’t see until about eight hours later, well, that’s nothing compared to writing for a magazine that had editorial deadlines some six to eight weeks ahead of the newsstand release date.

A massive part of my first boxing journalism job was brainstorming ways to cover the sport that could be relevant to a fan two months in the future.

And, amazingly, those magazines contained two-month-old fight results that some readers didn’t know about until they opened said magazines.

When boxing websites began to emerge, the people writing for them were not taken seriously as journalists. I recall one boxing executive around the end of the century openly scoffing at the credibility of anything he might read online. And at the fights, in press sections, internet writers were second-class citizens at best, seated in the back rows, or in the auxiliary area, or not credentialed at all.

Back in 1997, most major newspapers still had a dedicated full-time boxing writer — or at least a half-time boxing writer, splitting their time with maybe one other sports beat. In 2025, the number of full-time U.S. newspaper boxing writers is zero (no surprise given how many newspapers have gone out of circulation in the past 28 years).

As I explored in depth last November when The Ring changed ownership, the great majority of the boxing media did not have blatant conflicts of interest in 1997, and the great majority of the boxing media does have them now.

Twenty-eight years ago, your responsibility in deciding what to cover and how to cover it was to your readers and your editors. Since then, gradually, bit by bit, responsibility to the boxing-broadcasting or boxing-promoting company that owns your outlet has been added to the mix.

Full disclosure: BoxingScene is owned by the same company that promotes and streams fight cards under the ProBox banner. I don’t believe the words you read on this site betray a conflict of interest, but I do acknowledge that a theoretical conflict exists.

As for my original boxing media home The Ring and the degrees of concession and compromise seen there since the Saudi General Entertainment Authority purchased the magazine and website, that requires its own deeper dive, which I plan to undertake a few columns down the road. For now, let’s just say I have concerns about the sturdiness of the wall separating the money and the power from the media arm.

Bottom line: Independent boxing journalism still exists in 2025, but it’s a whole lot harder to find than it’s ever been before.

And I find that to be true even on boxing broadcasts. This is certainly not the case with everyone calling fights, but increasingly, many boxing commentators have taken on traits of pro wrestling commentators, spending airtime telling the story the promotion wants them to tell and/or selling the product.

What about other media formats? Certainly, between 1997 and now, the available outlets have transformed significantly.

If you wanted to talk at length about boxing in the ‘90s, maybe, if you had established a name in the sport, you could find a sports radio station somewhere to give you a time slot. Now, anyone with a little free time and a hint of ambition can start a boxing podcast.

In my early days on the boxing beat, a handful of independent boxing journalists would self-publish printed newsletters. Nowadays, writers with a similar mindset — at all different levels of prominence — are self-publishing on Substack.

In the ‘90s, Max Kellerman was way out on his own strange limb, talking into a camera about boxing on a New York cable access show, laying the groundwork for getting hired in 1998 by ESPN. Now hundreds of boxing fans, some surely with dreams of following a Kellerman-like path, are vying for attention with their own YouTube channels.

Some of those YouTubers are quite successful, even if the degree to which you might consider them “journalists” varies. Some call themselves “videographers,” a fair term to use. Some do fluff interviews. Some try to insert themselves into the stories. Some are conducting deeply compelling interviews and giving fans a level of access they never had in other eras.

But the media rooms sure are different now. Press conferences used to be filled with audio recorders and notebooks, and all the video cameras you saw there were sent by local or national TV stations and perched on a riser across the room from the dais. Now half the folks at the press conferences are taking their own videos and swarming for an up-close position in the scrum the instant the boxer steps down from the dais.

And of course, there’s social media. When I started my career, it didn’t exist. But for more than half my time on the boxing beat, it’s been a significant element of almost every journalist’s portfolio. It’s how we break news, it’s how we fire off takes, and it’s how we promote our work.

But probably more significantly, it’s become a huge part of how boxers and promoters get their messages out.

When I first started on the beat, if a boxer wanted to state his case that he’s the best in his division or he was robbed in his last fight or so-and-so is ducking him, he needed someone in the external media to put his words out there, whether in video, audio, or printed form.

Now, a boxer can get his message out there anytime he wants, rendering formal interviews less essential to the athlete. And us journalists sometimes have nothing else to quote in our stories beyond what the fighter wrote on X or said in an Instagram video.

On rare occasions, a boxer becomes a ticket-selling superstar by building a following on social media — Ryan Garcia being the most extreme example.

Part of the problem with this shift toward social media is that the posts and the PR are often repeated by fans and journalists but not challenged, not checked against a second source. The line between media and mouthpiece is increasingly blurred.

All that said, in many respects, it’s never been easier for boxing writers to do their jobs. Sure, some outlets are denied access by some promotions in this new environment (more to come on that in the aforementioned promised follow-up column). And the pace of posting and publishing is relentless in a way it wasn’t pre-internet.

But before BoxRec, before YouTube, before Google, every element of research was more painstaking and less productive. Now, there’s no fight you can’t watch, no fact you can’t look up — no excuse for not knowing.

I don’t know if being a boxing journalist is “better” now than when I started, just like I don’t know if it’s “better” now that we can watch more fights but that no casual fans can randomly stumble across live boxing on any old-school TV channels.

It’s different. It’s evolution. It’s devolution.

Changing, and watching the world change around you, are part of getting older.

I have no choice but to roll with those changes and try to cover the sport in whatever mode the moment allows, with whatever tools and access are available to me.

And I’ll just hope I reach retirement age before the AI boxing writers are good enough to replace me entirely.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.