Why Pablo Torre Wanted to Investigate Clarkson's Bird Gate: “It Led to a Modern Morality Play”

The sports and culture journalist speaks with THR about how he approached his reporting while acknowledging what people are saying about it online.

Who would have thought that a battle between a pop star/talk show host and a Brooklyn magic shop would dominate the cultural conversation online?

In fact, Kelly Clarkson and her very online beef with a $15,000+ (or is that $15,000,000?) flying automaton was the story everyone was talking about this week. But it was Pablo Torre Finds Out host Pablo Torre who actually took it up a notch by obtaining security camera footage of Clarkson's visit to the store and letting viewers see the interaction in question for themselves.

Torre, of course, is the journalist who broke the Los Angeles Clippers and Kawhi Leonard salary cap scandal, an investigation that has led to the team and owner Steve Ballmer facing heavy fines and a possible criminal investigation. He was also named to The Hollywood Reporter's Power List in New York earlier this year for his work in breaking the story. Oh year, he won a Pulitzer for it too.

THR caught up with Toure to find out why exactly she wanted to look into the Clarkson debate, producing her show and sitting at the intersection of the worlds of journalism and the creative economy. (The interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Why did you even decide to check this out in the first place?

In my show, we tend to take silly things seriously, and sometimes serious things silly. But this is a story that I became obsessed with because I live here in New York City. I've been to that shop before. I'm actually a huge Kelly Clarkson fan and it was a modern morality play where everyone is trying to figure out what's true. My show, I would say, is doing an investigation of culture in every investigation we do of sports, and that's something I think we can contribute to.

I was going to say that one of the things I love about the show is that you're going to need months of in-depth research, but if there's something going on in pop culture, you're not afraid to dive in and figure it out. How do you balance them? I have to assume you do a lot of research at any given time, but sometimes things happen. What would it take to get to the point where you feel like, well, I think we can contribute to that?

Toure: We learn this in real time. It all feels to me like we're making the show like an experiment, and the payoff of our months of research, our deepest dive, has yielded a level of results beyond our imagination.

But what we also do as people who exist on the Internet and in the real world is always try to figure out: Is this thing that's breaking right now something that we can turn on? And as such, I don't think there's anything like a rule or a standard for when we blow up a week we've carefully planned for months because a damn flying car becomes the center of national controversy.

This is a sentence that if you had said it to me a week ago, I would have felt like I had taken acid. But maybe there is an ambassador of Arjan who makes you feel like you are addicted to drugs and the only way to get sober is journalism. I am working with you on the phone right now. Maybe that's the benchmark for us, but I don't know. And it's kind of fun that the unpredictability of what ends up being our show is sometimes a mystery box even to ourselves.

It's interesting because when you have a real investigation that I'm sure you've been working on for a long time, it can drive the news cycle. But you are right; Sometimes following what's going on, following the news cycle, if you have a way to contribute, is a way to break what's going on. We definitely see it. We're just as guilty as everyone else of following Kelly Clarkson's magic shop story.

Well, it's interesting because what I've discovered about my program is that we do deep dives that sometimes take a year, and once they're released and they hit the news cycle, we find that the news cycle itself is our best distribution method.

We really benefit from the fact that we've made news organically, and I mean in the sense of conversation and coverage, which is organic and not something we can ever control, but I mean in the sense that things happen in real time in response to the story. Also in the series of events that we're covering. So it becomes a series and we never know how many episodes it will be.

Obviously, with the Clippers story, we're in episode 16. In this case, I don't know if we're going to do a sequel to Kelly Clarkson's Bird stories, but if it's the right approach, I'm all for it. But it all felt like we were dealing with a pseudo-psychedelic true crime series that we were reporting in real time.

I mean, honestly, I feel like this is one of those stories that in a month, 99.9% of people will forget about it, but right now, everyone's obsessed with it, and that's fine. It is part of the culture

So, I think what I struggle with that very fair point of yours is how do you make disposables last? And for us, we always prioritize lasting stories that have depth and substance. I have to point out that the real turning point for why we wanted to cover this story, in terms of how we did it in the full episode, was that we realized there's a deep conversation around the power of celebrity and how that power can be abused when it comes to the audience, and it's not just about Kelly Clarkson. It's about Taylor Swift and Beyoncé and Donald Trump and BTS and every awesome person in the public eye whose fans are their business, and what happens when they direct it without saying it explicitly, but implicitly making it seem like there's a call to action.

At any given moment, how many stories are you telling while you're reporting?

Toure: Oh my god, our story is funny. I mean, we have — I'm looking at my Google calendar — dozens of things in various stages of production right now. It's hard for me to say, because the way our show works is that we're always on a runway, and unfortunately we're always letting the people who've walked by, "Hey, can you focus on this story?" "Can you fit in this plane?" "We're getting ready for you guys to fly on Tuesday." Sometimes you end up waiting on the tarmac, and so there's a couple of -- and I'm not kidding -- there's two planes right now that I think are A-plus stories that just have zero coverage, and so we've had these poor people waiting on the tarmac for a year, and I'm so excited to tell people those stories.

But things like this keep happening, whether it's the flying automaton or the next big Ballmer lawsuit or the next sports gambling development in New York's eastern region, it's all too much.

How much do you think your research is done in the public eye versus working behind the scenes? With the Clippers investigation, as you said, it's kind of ongoing. There are episodes that came out after the first two episodes, but earlier this week you talked about Fanatics and LeBron James and that relationship.

This is a public conversation that might turn into something. Is there any point in talking about these things in public? Or is it easier to work in private and show it when you think it's ready?

That's a great question, and we talk about this particular question a lot. In general, I would say that we always do more than we can share publicly, and that is the nature of research. That's the nature of it—we make a lot of calls and follow a lot of paths down weird rabbit holes—and some of them are dead ends.

But sometimes these are the signs we follow to get to the real truth, and so there's a huge inefficiency here, only in human terms, we're that duck flapping angrily under the surface. Even as you see us flapping our wings so hard, you know we still do a lot more than I think people can see. And I don't mean to dramatize ourselves. I don't mean to say how neurotic we are, but there are points in every story where it's time to show your work, and what we show is what's publishable, what we think is fair to publish, and once it's out, yes, we're proud to tell you that's why we're doing it. This is how we came to this. These are the questions we still have.

And when we ask a question, sometimes we know what the answer might be, but sometimes we just don't know, and that leads me to, for example -- I'm just going to point to the Clippers. Because it's the most common frame of reference -- it leads me to a discussion with Mark Cuban, where I think I knew more than Mark at various points that we were discussing. There were things that I hadn't published that I had a fairly strong sense of, that showed my confidence and convictions, but I wasn't ready to report it, and I wasn't ready to say it, and so I didn't say it. And when I was ready to report, that's when people got it.

One of the things I appreciate is that you sit at this intersection of journalism and the creative economy, and as someone who is a journalist but follows the creative world closely, it's fascinating to me because there are so many journalists in traditional news media who have the luxury of spending a lot of time developing research and publishing or publishing.

But if you're a creator, you need to have a regular track of things. How did you figure out how to do this? I know you have a partnership with The Athletic, which is obviously very helpful, but how do you make sure you can feed the animal? Whether it's pure journalism or something like when [art critic] Jerry Saltz reviewed the sports awards, how do you make sure you're also nurturing the journalism that I think you've become known for?

So it's a reverse engineering problem, and specifically as someone who has looked into the eyes and I've met - I guess they're my creators? Although I don't think I would necessarily do quite what they do. But I, like you, am fascinated by them because I wasn't raised that way, and I also now have a job that requires three episodes a week.

And so, in that reverse engineering, Okay, you have three episodes a week, but your goals are different. Your goals are journalistic, they are both about pursuing your curiosity and making an impact. So in this context, what do you do? I remember meeting MrBeast recently. He was on Morning Joe and I was co-hosting that day. He is prolific, but also very tired.

Like, they're all burned. I think some of them are superhuman, but a lot of them are just tired. And so, really, the problem with reverse engineering is this: I have myself, and I think I've had the privilege of prioritizing what I find energizing. At the same time, when I start creating a docket, what I reverse engineer is, "Okay, what's the most important thing we're going to do? What's the brief here? What's the aspiration level review?" Because we're going to work around it, and so when we put it on our calendar, then we start filling it, and it's like, so it's going to take the most time, the most resources. What is going to come second most?

There's a version of our show where we come out six times a year, and we just like the deepest dives... But then things happen every week, and you look at the news cycle, and then you realize, OK, wait a minute, Jerry Saltz. We are his fans, we love the guy. We try to always find ways to do different sports. What if we ask him to examine the statues? What if we have a Korean statue of myself? Was it like parodying my ego or a way to make fun of it? So I think it's like, how can we design things that are conceptually different, but not as heavy? And once you're on that track, which is like a different genre of show, you're going to have a lot of fun. And so we have this whole group of characters who are forced to do weird things. And it's a bit of a palate cleanser for me, and probably hopefully for the audience.

To bring it back to Kelly Clarkson: You finally bought a pen for a good cause. It's a silly story, but you managed to involve something that I think will actually bring some good to the world. Can you explain why you decided to cover the story when you did?

So, among the levels of why that story crossed the line for us, I have to point to the fact that as soon as I saw that there was this other preferred auto that Kelly Clarkson had no interest in, and she had no interest in it, as evidenced by the tape that we got from the security cameras, that she wouldn't even stay to hear the cost, which is $200.

This occurred to me... is this too much money for us? For example, if we were to go and buy another bird, what would we do with it? Because we think in the spirit of a show like John Oliver, to be honest, where there's a third act, and we've done our own iterations of that.

In the episode Aspiration Part One, we had a guy dressed as Iron Man plant a tree, a sad little apple tree, a sapling, in front of the Intuit dome. That was kind of our climax at the end of that one. This was another small version of what we were inspired to do, because in this case, we actually had to draw attention to a real-life tragedy. David Samson, who's with us on these episodes of Aspiration, who's a friend of the show and a frequent contributor, his daughter Kyra died over the summer, and I'd met him, I'd met David's family, David, who's now one of my closest friends, and his response to that was the most superhuman thing I've ever experienced. That's when she decided to create the Kyra Fund, fight glioblastoma, seek a cure, and get back to work. And so, in honor of that, in honor of having a charity and a cause close to home, I thought, what better way to draw attention to something as profoundly silly as a really small grievance that saturated our entire brains. How can we focus all this attention on something positive?

And so we put it up for auction. And my hope is that some incredibly fiscally irresponsible person will realize that they can own a piece of pop culture history and find a cure for one of the worst types of brain cancer there is. So, yes, I hope people take this part seriously as well.