Former NFL Network employee Jim Trotter has no regrets about pressuring Roger Goodell publicly

Jim Trotter stood up at a pre-Super Bowl press conference and asked NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell some hard questions. Technically, Trotter worked for the league.

Making the boss look bad isn’t a good look on any job. But Jim Trotter said he felt called to do so. He’d already been asking about why the NFL Network employed so few people of color for its News Desk. He felt that asking Goodell in a very public place was a last resort. Within weeks, he’d lost his job.

“You have to make a decision,” Jim Trotter told USA Today. “For me, it’s at a point in my career, a point in my life, where you start to ask yourself, ‘What is your purpose? What impact have you had?’ ”

Trotter, who now is a columnist with The Athletic, will be honored laster this summer with the Bill Nunn Jr. Award for his contributions as a journalist covering the NFL. He’s 59 now, with more than 30 years in the sports journalism business. He got his first job in the 1980s.

“When I first got in the (profession), I didn’t see many of us,” Jim Trotter said. “And there weren’t many of us, in terms of our sports department. So, that’s kind of what I’ve been fighting for, trying to make a difference in that way, particularly after we saw the way the Colin Kaepernick situation covered. To say we are in a position to make a difference, that it’s imperative that we step up and meet that challenge if we can.”

NABJ took up the Jim Trotter cause in regards to lack of diversity

Decades later, Trotter joined the NFL Network as a columnist. He noticed that there no Black writers on the News Desk. So he asked Goodell about it at two different press conferences. Last month, the National Association of Black Journalists issued a statement calling attention to the lack of diversity within the NFL media ranks. NABJ also said that NFL Films had only one Black woman with a job amongst its 200 employees.

“What people don’t know is that I have been raising the issue internally, really, since I got to the Network in 2018,” Trotter said. “And more specifically over the past two years that I was there. I was raising it to management. I brought it up in various settings internally. So, when you feel like you’re not being heard internally, then the next step is that you have an opportunity to address the Commissioner.

“I felt like it was important to do that.” he said. “Because here’s the thing. It’s too important of an issue. When you have a player population that is 60-70% Black and you don’t have one Black manager in the newsroom, you don’t have one Black employee on the news desk, you are doing a disservice to the player population that you cover. Because there is no one at that decision-making table that shares their cultural experiences or life experiences, to represent their point of view.”