Pablo Torre won a Pulitzer and picked a fight with ESPN. Now comes the hard part.

On 25 September 2026, Pablo Torre brought Michael Cruz Kayne and Katie Nolan into an episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out that moved from allegations about Donald Trump Jr.’s Bahamas wedding, reported by ProPublica, to Kim Kardashian’s Team Moms and the US youth-sports industry. Cruz Kayne, who hosts ‘But Also’, turned 24 during the episode. Nolan, the host of ‘Casuals’, said her birthday was that weekend and that she had never used a tanning bed.

The range is part of the proposition. Pablo Torre Finds Out operates as an audio-first newsroom, combining investigations with personality-led conversation.

For Torre, the format follows a long route through established sports media. The child of immigrant parents, he attended Harvard and spent about 15 years at ESPN before leaving in 2023.

That year, he started Pablo Torre Finds Out with Meadowlark as a quirky sports podcast. During 2024–25, it developed into an investigative newsroom, and Torre won a Pulitzer.

‘I worked my whole life to be an overnight success,’ Torre said.

The sharpest measure of what the operation has become is its reporting on the Clippers. Torre reported nearly a year before the NBA’s penalty that the team was circumventing the league’s salary cap through sponsorship deals involving the star Kawhi Leonard.

Last month, the NBA handed the Clippers a heavy penalty after a near 12-month investigation. The law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz published a report following that inquiry.

ESPN later reported that the NBA had found ‘no evidence showing Clippers owner Steve Ballmer funneled money through team sponsors to pay Kawhi Leonard in order to circumvent the salary cap’.

The report was written by the veteran ESPN journalists Don Van Natta, Baxter Holmes and Ramona Shelburne. ESPN did not seek comment from Torre before publishing it.

Torre said the omission was painful because of his years at the network. ‘The thing that was disappointing about that chapter was just that I'd worked with all those people. I had respect for all of those people, and there's an opportunity to reach out to me. Not that I'm owed it, but perhaps that would have saved a lot of people some headaches, especially given that at various points in the past year, I had spoken to them each about lots of things, and this had not come up.’

The dispute did not end there. NBA spokesperson Mike Bass said ESPN’s story contained ‘numerous and significant inaccuracies’. ESPN said it stood by its reporting and had sent multiple requests for comment.

The episode illustrates the tension in Torre’s experiment. He has moved from ESPN into a newsroom built around an audio format, while pursuing reporting that can put him in direct conflict with his former employer. Whether that approach can sustain itself as a business remains the central question for Pablo Torre Finds Out.