The Dianna Russini story keeps getting bigger. A new feature from Katherine Rosman and Ken Belson of The New York Times dropped Wednesday and tucked inside the reporting was the kind of number that turns heads in the media business. Russini was reportedly making close to $800,000 per year at The Athletic before her resignation.
That salary, sourced from a former manager who had knowledge of her negotiation, would have made her one of the highest paid journalists at the entire New York Times Company. The Athletic was bought by the Times in 2022 for $550 million as part of the company’s push into sports. Russini was promoted as one of the faces of that strategy.
Context matters here. Russini built that price tag the right way. She broke real stories, owned her sources around the NFL, and grew her brand on television. When ESPN talked her out of her previous role, The Athletic eventually pulled her back with a deal that reflected what high end NFL insiders can command in this market. Eight hundred grand is the kind of number Adam Schefter and Adrian Wojnarowski commanded at their peaks.
The fallout from the Mike Vrabel situation flipped all of that on its head. Photos of Vrabel and Russini holding hands surfaced earlier this year. Then came a report that the pair had rented a private boat together in 2021 while Russini was pregnant. Vrabel kept his job in New England. Russini did not. She resigned from The Athletic and deleted her X account.
According to the new reporting, the timing made the financial picture even messier. Russini’s existing contract was set to expire at the end of June. She and The Athletic were in talks on an extension when the story broke. That extension is now off the table. Whatever she was about to lock in is gone.
This is the brutal economics of sports media. The reporter’s value is tied to access and credibility. Russini’s reporting was not the issue. The optics around a source relationship with a head coach made it impossible to keep her in front of cameras and on bylines without becoming the story herself. The Athletic, owned by the most cautious media company in the country, had no real option once that calculation became clear.
The Times sports operation is going through real growing pains. The publication has had bumpy moments around layoffs and restructuring. Losing a face of the brand under these circumstances does not help, and the $800K disclosure now becomes part of the internal conversation about whether the celebrity reporter model still works for them.
What happens next for Russini is the open question. Insider reporters who lose access typically have a short shelf life. She still has a strong national footprint and could land at a podcast network or a digital first outlet that values her name brand. The question is whether a TV network would touch her with how recent all of this is.
Vrabel, somehow, has avoided meaningful professional consequence. Robert Kraft and the Patriots have continued to back him. There has been no formal NFL investigation made public. The asymmetry of who paid the cost in this story is going to keep getting attention.
The $800K number will be the takeaway most readers remember. It tells you how valuable Russini was perceived to be. It also tells you how much was on the line when this story broke.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
