Why the Polymarket/Substack partnership is bad

I’m going off schedule this week because of some breaking news.

I’m also not going to bury the lede. This is a bad idea. It is a very, very, very bad idea.1 It is the kind of thing that could have long-term negative repercussions on online sports journalism. It strikes at the heart of the production of ethical sports journalism.

Imagine for a second that instead of Polymarket, this was FanDuel announcing an exclusive partnership with Substack. Or Draft Kings. What would your reaction be? What would everyone’s reaction be?

This is no different. This enables the ability to embed gambling data into posts about sports. Yes, prediction markets are sports gambling. I’m not interested in the distinction without a difference here. It’s gambling. And this is bad.

The promise of all journalism — but let’s focus on sports here, because that’s what we do — is independence. At the end of the day, that’s what we do as journalists. We are independent from the people we are writing about. We don’t write what the team wants, we don’t write what the leagues want, we don’t write what our sources want. We present a fair, accurate, and independently produced reports on the teams and leagues we cover.

The SPJ Code of Ethics has four precepts. One of them is Act Independently.

Deny favored treatment to advertisers, donors or any other special interests, and resist internal and external pressure to influence coverage.

This partnership makes ethical sports journalism on Substack, on its face, impossible. Even if you think including gambling information is fine, and doesn’t intrinsically change the nature of what’s presented (more on this in a second), this gives favored treatment to Polymarket by favoring its data over other markets or sports books.

On to the larger ethical issue for sports journalists.

In this space, one of the biggest potential ethical landmines has been the possibility of insider trading. The idea that a sports journalist could place a bet on something they learn before reporting it. Or that they could write something to deliberately shift the betting lines. This was the core of the Shams Charania scandal from the 2023 NBA Draft that inexplicably disappeared from the discourse really quickly.2

The reporting and research I’ve done in this area does suggest that this fear is a bit overblown. It’s possible but not likely. At the pro and major college level, information is shared so quickly and reporters value their reputation so deeply that it’s not realistic that anyone would bet before reporting. And at the lower levels of sport like mid-major colleges and Olympic sports, frankly those teams aren’t covered on a day-to-day basis the way they used to be.

It’s also worth noting that professional journalists working for news organizations have codes of ethics they work under, both internally and externally. There are real professional consequences to violating those.

Do those norms and codes exist to people on Substack? Or is that part of the freedom that this platform purports to offer? And Substack has become such a network that the possibility of a writer on this site writing posting something that could impact betting lines is not zero.

There’s a larger ethical issue beyond insider trading.

Why is a story written?

This gets to the independence of sports journalists. We write stories to inform the public. We write stories that have some news value for our audience. The news values we teach and learned in journalism school vary from professor to professor, but all of them at their core reflect a public service element of the job.

Introducing gambling information, and embedded links to a gambling site, fundamentally changes this.

Writing a story about “Will Giannis get traded?” is one thing. That’s a legit thing to write. People are interested in it, it’s newsworthy by any definition.

“Will Giannis get traded — and here’s a link to the live prediction markets to act on this actionable information” is fundamentally different.

It raises the question: Are you writing this story because it’s a real newsworthy topic? Because you have a good interesting take? Or because you can push readers to a gambling site and subtly suggest they can win some money on this?

My friend Michael Mirer made this point for a story I wrote for Global Sport Matters a few years ago:

“There’s a big difference between tweeting ‘Player X is inactive today’ and ‘Player X is inactive today; here’s a link to a gambling site where you can act on that information,’” Mirer said.

Yes, someone can always bet on the information you can report. But there’s a fundamental difference between reporting something people then bet on, and reporting something people can bet on and then providing them a direct link to the betting place.

The fundamental difference is ethical journalism.

Which Substack and Polymarket just made that much harder.