Joon Lee on the Future of Sports Journalism
Joon Lee, a 2012 Free Spirit Scholar, spoke with Freedom Forum in December 2025. Learn more about Freedom Forum’s Al Neuharth Free Spirit and Journalism Conference here.
Sports — and sports journalism — are at a crossroads. And sports journalist Joon Lee is building his own path.
In 2025, he launched Morning Announcements, the production company that’s now behind his independent YouTube channel, which currently has more than 25,000 subscribers.
He’s setting out to do sports journalism in a new way, but Lee isn’t new to sports. His family moved to Boston from South Korea when he was two months old. He calls sports his first language: his way to see the world, connect with friends, understand culture, see Asian faces be valued and not only caricatured, and be part of a bigger community. It didn’t hurt to grow up as part of what he calls the “most entitled generation of sports fans ever,” seeing three Super Bowl trophies, two World Series wins and an NBA championship for Boston teams in just 10 years.
But since then, he’s seen sports and fandom — and how they’re covered — change. He wrote in a June 2025 New York Times op-ed how “increasingly, access to cultural life is paywalled,” citing financial pressures on traditional media and “streaming wars” pushing broadcasts behind more disparate paid logins.
Sports are fundamentally broken and have changed, he says, from being about underdogs, dynasties, heartbreak and redemption into recycling hot takes and commoditizing through sports gambling.
Lee’s YouTube channel, which has committed to never accepting any sports gambling sponsorships, aims to prove that a business model for independent, rigorous journalism outside the corporate culture is viable.
“My vision for Morning Announcements [the company behind his sports journalism videos] is to basically try to build a production company that understands the intersection between the creator economy and the way that legacy media has traditionally worked,” Lee told Freedom Forum.
“I think I have a unique understanding of how both of these worlds work.”
Lee has been part of both worlds. He got his start in traditional journalism early, after realizing his short-lived dream to play pro sports might need a backup plan. A sports magazine class at a Wellesley College summer camp in seventh grade introduced him to sports writing and the possibility of a different kind of career in sports.
His next major inflection point was a high school summer journalism program in Washington, D.C., run by the nonprofit Freedom Forum. At the Al Neuharth Free Spirit and Journalism Conference, Lee found a north star: the First Amendment. Being selected to represent Massachusetts at the competitive program in 2012, he says, also unlocked a sense of possibility, opening his eyes to the world of journalism outside Boston and outside sports.
What's the Al Neuharth Free Spirit and Journalism Conference?
Now celebrating its 25th anniversary, the Al Neuharth Free Spirit and Journalism Conference is an engaging, in-depth, five-day summer program for 51 high school juniors (one from each state and the District of Columbia) who “Dream. Dare. Do.”
Participants get insider access to Washington, D.C., newsrooms, connect with other high school juniors from across the U.S. who share their passion for journalism, meet some of the nation’s top journalists and multimedia storytellers, and explore our capital city.
Lee followed this new road to his independent high school newspaper, an internship at the Boston Herald covering the Red Sox clubhouse, and the student newspaper at Cornell University. Being part of the student newspapers and, at his dad’s urging, taking some economics courses, helped him see the importance of independence in “speaking truth to power” and how the business side of the media shapes editorial priorities.
Like some of the pro athletes Lee’s profiled, his big dreams have come true, been dashed and evolved during his career.
Lee was hired at Bleacher Report on the last day of finals in his senior year. He got to travel the country doing longform magazine writing and working toward the ultimate dream: working for ESPN, going on TV on “Around the Horn,” and writing in-depth pieces about sports and culture.
Two years later, at age 23, that dream came true when he was hired at ESPN in 2019, and in some ways, his life came full circle as he covered Korean baseball broadcasts during the COVID-19 pandemic, when much of sports shut down.
But in 2023, with nearly two years left on his contract, Lee was laid off.
“The conference ... really opened and unlocked the sense of possibility for me about what I could potentially achieve in my career.”
— Joon Lee on participating in Freedom Forum's Al Neuharth Free Spirit and Journalism Conference
Forced to be just a fan again, Lee saw how different the world of sports is now. He saw a need to do things differently — and to revisit another aspect of his youth.
Just like Lee was introduced to traditional journalism early on, as a YouTube technology reviewer in high school, he also entered the world of content creation before “influencer” became a common term. A few review videos for iPhone 5 cases still lurk on his channel.
But content creation has come a long way since then — and so has Lee. An example: He’s launched “The Hardest Thing in Sports,” a fun, informative creator-style series that features him trying (and largely failing) at various sports skills, so viewers like a younger Lee can see what it really takes to go pro.
His channel also covers the less romantic elements of sports and the stories he says legacy media aren’t fully telling, like how the business side of sports is shaping fan experiences, making fandom unreachable for many, and how private equity is changing how owners run teams.
Sports are more than a game to Lee; they’re a story about our culture, business, economic inequality, politics and community.
These are the stories Lee’s unique set of experiences is now enabling him to explore, one sports story — or video — at a time.
Karen Hansen is a staff writer at Freedom Forum. She can be reached at [email protected].
For any questions on the Al Neuharth Free Spirit and Journalism Conference, please email us at [email protected].
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