Earlier, sports and sportsbooks used to keep their distance. Now they share logos, airtime, and revenue. For ESPN journalist Nicole Noren, that shift has crossed a line she couldn’t walk past anymore. After spending over two decades crossing that boundary, she decided to leave instead of looking the other way.
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Noren was an investigative producer and documentary filmmaker who resigned from ESPN in July 2024 after spending 24 years with the network. Her departure was a quiet, internal resignation at the time, but she publicly detailed her reasons for the first time on October 14, 2026.
“I was out,” Noren told reporter Danny Funt of Columbia Journalism Review. “I’m not going to work for a gambling company and have blood on my hands.”
Historically, ESPN and its parent company, The Walt Disney Company, maintained a strict moral and corporate distance from sports gambling. However, as traditional cable television revenues declined, legacy media companies faced intense pressure to find new digital revenue streams.
Following the 2018 Supreme Court decision that legalized sports betting across the U.S., ESPN executives shifted from running standard reporting on gambling lines to directly monetizing the trend.
The tipping point for Noren’s departure occurred in August 2023, when ESPN signed a massive 10-year, $1.5 billion licensing deal with Penn Entertainment. This led to the November 2023 launch of ESPN BET, a proprietary sportsbook operated under ESPN’s name.
Because the Penn Entertainment partnership struggled to capture significant market share (stagnating around 5% by early 2025), both parties mutually decided to end the partnership early, with the termination effective December 1, 2025.
Meanwhile, ESPN signed its multi-year deal with DraftKings on November 6, 2025, and the deal became effective December 1, 2025, according to ESPN’s press release at the time.
For Nicole Noren, sports betting was a no-go territory.
“For so many years, there was a really strict line in the sand when it came to sports betting. Then the tide slowly began turning internally. It was very troubling for me to see the normalization of betting and ESPN’s complete acceptance of that, and finally, they just decided to go all in. It worried me. I knew what gambling addiction could do to families.
“My grandfather, my father, and one of my brothers were pretty much destroyed by sports gambling addiction.”
After resigning from her 24-year career at ESPN, Nicole transitioned into a free-agent, independent filmmaker and investigative journalist. She currently heads her own production company, focusing on character-driven investigative documentaries, health, and social accountability projects.
Noren has also directed and produced several high-profile short and long-form documentary projects that include The Green Truck (2026), Missing at Sea (2025), and Out of Bounds: In Search of Antonio Brown (2025).
And through similar interviews, like the one with the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), Noren has used different platforms to raise awareness about the public health risks of gambling addiction and sports media ethics.