Dianna Russini Made $800,000 a Year at The Athletic Before Mike Vrabel Scandal Sank Her Career
The Athletic was paying Dianna Russini close to $800,000 a year before she resigned in disgrace over the Mike Vrabel scandal. That is the number, courtesy of a New York Times investigation, and the sports media world is still processing it.
To put it in perspective, $800,000 puts Russini in the same salary tier as some of the highest-paid journalists at the entire Times Company. Not the top sports columnists. The entire newsroom.
This is what The Athletic paid for a face. The publication, which the Times bought in 2022 for $550 million, leaned hard on Russini as the brand ambassador for its NFL coverage. She was the on-camera presence, the breaking news byline, the one whose name traveled across other networks. She delivered insider scoops and the polished aesthetic the Times wanted attached to its sports vertical.
Then came the Vrabel story. Photos surfaced of Russini and the now-Patriots head coach at a hotel together, then later on a private boat in 2021. Russini eventually resigned from The Athletic as the scandal grew, and the Times-led investigation began digging into what newsroom leadership knew and when.
Now we get the full salary picture, and it changes how everyone reads the story.
For the Patriots, the Vrabel saga is a sideshow they did not need. Vrabel was hired to bring discipline and stability to a franchise that needed both after the messy Jerod Mayo year. The narrative around his personal life is the opposite of what New England wanted six months into the tenure.
For The Athletic, the bigger issue is institutional. How does a publication pay a single reporter $800,000 and not have the editorial controls to flag a glaring conflict of interest with a source? Russini’s relationship with NFL coaches was an open joke in NFL media circles for years before the photos surfaced. Somebody, somewhere, had to know.
The Times Company is not going to comment publicly on the editorial fallout beyond what is in its own pages, but the financial details now floating around suggest the leadership had every reason to look the other way. Russini drove traffic. She moved subscription numbers. Whether she also moved the truth was a secondary concern.
Her contract was set to expire on June 30. Reports indicated The Athletic was working on an extension before the scandal blew up. Now Russini is unemployed, the scoop pipeline she fed has dried up, and the publication is left explaining how it spent that money.
What happens next for Russini is the harder question. NFL media is a tight circle, and the league office does not look kindly on reporters whose personal entanglements with team employees become public. She still has the relationships and the on-camera ability to land somewhere, but the price tag attached to her work just collapsed.
The $800,000 number will follow this story forever. It is also the reason nothing about it ever made sense, except in the context of a publication chasing prestige and willing to overpay for it.
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.
