Blake Griffin: The Players’ Tribune not trying to replace traditional media

Blake Griffin is a senior editor for the Players’ Tribune, but that doesn’t mean all of his stories run verbatim.

“Everything gets edited,” Griffin said earlier this week. “There’s probably never been a story that’s run on the first draft, so yeah, mine gets edited for sure. I’ll take all the help I can get but try to still have my ideas in there.”

Griffin has written about former Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s annual White Party and the wild day in which a contingent of Clippers players and executives trekked to Houston to get DeAndre Jordan to stay with the only NBA team he has known.

The point of the online media venture started last fall by former New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter, Griffin said, is to allow people to see athletes in a way different from the way they are portrayed by traditional media. Not that the Players’ Tribune has any intentions of supplanting its counterpart, Griffin said.

“We’re not trying to take over for the media,” Griffin said. “We just want to grow that respect from athletes in a different sense away from the court where they can sit down and actually have like a real conversation and see them as themselves.”

Griffin said he was involved in getting Jordan to write a piece for the website accompanying Griffin’s story about getting Jordan to remain a Clipper, and new Clipper Lance Stephenson has also contributed a story about his efforts to overcome his shaky reputation and the worst season of his career.

Griffin said he tried to spell out the truth about a day in which rumors flew about an invasion of Jordan’s home.

“My whole idea behind that was just to show that it wasn’t such a like very serious situation,” Griffin said. “We didn’t go down there to try to lock anybody out. He asked us to come down there and we went down there and we had a conversation and we waited for him to sign. From the outside looking in, it seemed like it was this huge ordeal, which it wasn’t.”

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