Chiefs scribes entered the season expecting the team’s defense of a Super Bowl title to dominate headlines; instead, they found themselves swept up by a modern-day version of DiMaggio and Monroe. “You have to cater to what the public craves and wants,” says one.Chiefs scribes entered the season expecting the team’s defense of a Super Bowl title to dominate headlines; instead, they found themselves swept up by a modern-day version of DiMaggio and Monroe. “You have to cater to what the public craves and wants,” says one.
Covering the Chiefs was already a plum assignment. For the last half decade, they have been the NFL’s premier team, winning two Super Bowls and appearing in three. Along with Kelce, perhaps the greatest tight end of all time, the Chiefs boast one of the most gifted quarterbacks to ever play in Patrick Mahomes and one of the league’s most decorated coaches in Andy Reid. With all that success and star power, journalists like Sweeney have rarely been bereft of storylines—or an audience for their work. But the Chiefs beat has never been as absorbing, or enthralling to the general public, as it has with this season’s emergence of a modern-day Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. On the field, the Chiefs have been uncharacteristically sloppy, their once-explosive offense suddenly huffing and puffing for points. The team opens postseason play on Saturday looking more vulnerable than it ever has in the Kelce-Mahomes-Reid era. But regardless of how the season ends, the enduring memory of the 2023 Kansas City Chiefs already feels settled.
“This has been the Taylor Swift season,” says Jesse Newell, the Chiefs beat writer for the Kansas City Star. “We all thought football was pretty important and that people get pretty obsessed with that. We feel like the whole nation watches football. But you bring Taylor Swift into this thing and you realize, Wow, she’s bigger. She’s way bigger.”
Much like Sweeney, Newell had his own moment of clarity when he realized that his editorial purview suddenly overlapped with celebrity tabloids. It came in the days before the Chiefs’ week-nine game against the Miami Dolphins in Germany, where Kelce was asked by a plucky reporter if he was in love with Swift. Newell could smell a story, but he wasn’t sure.
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“I was talking to my boss and wondering, Is this something that we write?” he recalls. “Obviously it’s pop culture clashing with the Kansas City Chiefs, but is this something that people would be interested in?” Newell got his answer soon enough. The story, he says, filed from Frankfurt, ranks as one of his most widely viewed pieces in eight years at the newspaper.
Journalists, like pop stars, have to play the hits sometimes too.
“From a coverage standpoint, we’ve looked at things differently just based on the interest,” Newell says. “You have to cater to what the public craves and wants.”
Neal Jones is no Swiftie, but he does have a daughter. That meant rides to and from school were often soundtracked by Swift’s catalog. And it also meant that Jones once had to serve as the “designated driver” when he chauffeured his wife and daughter, now in college, to a Swift concert.
“I don’t follow—what’s the term—popular culture, very much,” he says. As a sports anchor for local Kansas City station KCTV, Jones never really needed to. But these days, whether Jones is out getting groceries in Kansas City or appearing on a radio show elsewhere in the country, one topic eclipses all others. “I get more questions about Taylor Swift than I do about the Chiefs offense,” Jones says.
For sports reporters accustomed to dealing mostly in Xs and Os, the Swift-Kelce storyline has forced them to work different muscles, dragging them away from game plans and into the realm of gossip. “It is sometimes challenging to find that line between football and what’s appropriate,” Newell says. “But obviously, I think what we’ve learned through this whole thing is that there is a whole lot of interest in this relationship.”
ete Sweeney had a rule. In his job as editor in chief of Arrowhead Pride, a website dedicated to all things Kansas City Chiefs, Sweeney made it a policy to “not really talk about the family members and personal lives of the players.” That is, he adds, “unless we’re forced to.”
Less than a month into this past regular season, with the media frenzy surrounding Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce already reaching fever pitch, Sweeney knew it was “one of those situations where we were forced to.” The realization came in late September, when the Chiefs were preparing to host the Chicago Bears. A few days before kickoff, Sweeney’s colleague published a short article about the budding romance on Arrowhead Pride, part of SB Nation’s network of team-focused sites. On the morning of gameday, amid breathless speculation online that Swift would be in attendance, traffic for the article surged thanks to an algorithmic blessing from Google. “At that stage,” Sweeney says, “I realized we had to at least cover this to a certain point.”
