On Oct. 26, the NFL announced that Jay-Z will headline the Super Bowl LXI halftime show at SoFi Stadium. That should have been a great story. He is a 25-time Grammy winner who sold out three Yankee Stadium shows this year.
It didn’t play out that way. The cause wasn’t the leak itself, but what came after. On Oct. 20, Puck reported that, according to multiple sources, Jay-Z had effectively “picked himself.” The report was not hostile. It described a consensus choice.
Then came the silence. For six days, the league and Roc Nation said nothing publicly. Into that gap came the Kaepernick storyline from the 2019 Roc Nation deal. Some viewed the deal as the NFL buying credibility and Jay-Z selling out.
When Commissioner Roger Goodell finally made the announcement, he said the right thing: “When we first reached an agreement with Roc Nation to produce the show, I had just one request: that JAY-Z take the stage himself one day, whenever the moment felt right to him.”
That line could have run on Oct. 20 without spoiling a thing. It confirms nothing about the show, but frames the choice as the league’s own.
I’ve seen the opposite problem. In Beijing, the leak was hostile, and I had an hour.
I was handling PR for the NBA China Games on Oct. 10, 2012. Commissioner David Stern was due onstage for a press conference with the Chinese Basketball Association when a New York Times reporter called me.
I had been working with him on a good story that I pitched: the opening of a three-level NBA Center outside Beijing with basketball courts, an NBA store and an NBA cafe.
The reporter said the story would include the NBA Center but also focus on how the league had said it would build 12 NBA-style arenas in China and start an NBA China league. Neither happened, and he planned to explain how announcing the NBA Center was a step back from grander ambitions.
I alerted the head of our communications department and went to see then-Deputy Commissioner Adam Silver, who armed me with facts and rebuttals. Silver was calm and specific. That’s what an hour is for.
I went back to the reporter and walked him through our objections one by one. He pushed back on some and accepted others. The biggest win: I got him to hold the piece until after the press conference. It ran in print on Oct. 12.
We used that day well. Our department head and my teammates helped line up three positive features with other national outlets. I do not remember which outlets.
When the Times piece ran, it was better than we expected. The headline, “NBA Plans Complex Outside Beijing,” was mild. Our rebuttals shaped it, and the three features balanced what remained critical. Without that hour, the coverage out of Beijing could have been negative.
What the two cases show
In Beijing, speed limited damage. At the NFL, speed would have preserved a good story. Friendly leaks cost more to ignore because no one feels the urgency.
The NFL may have been holding the news for its Monday Night Football slot. That’s a legitimate reason. But the league could have confirmed Goodell’s “one request” language without revealing the show.
I don’t know what the NFL was weighing internally. But when good news leaks, whoever speaks first sets the frame.
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