We at Jossip don't really care about sports, but we do think ESPN is doing awesome things for sports journalists. We talked to Rob King, the editor-in-chief of ESPN.com to talk about investing in writing, fan expectation and how his son wants an elevator for his birthday.

ESPN seems to be aggressive in pursuing top-notch journalists over the past few months. So what's up with that?

It's something that has been going on for a long time. If you look at some of the people who make decisions here, they come from newspapers, magazines like Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated. Vince Doria, who oversees our news coverage, is a longtime newspaper man. … It seems to be happening a condensed burst. Rick Reilly is a big enough name that it has generated more attention to what we're doing. But the truth of the matter is that we've long been involved with trying to find the best sports journalists we can. I'm happy recipient of that kind of attention myself. I was in newspapers for more than 20 years. I was working at the Philadelphia Inquirer when ESPN came and made me an offer I couldn't refuse.

Along with acquiring Rick Reilly, ESPN also got one of those guys from the BALCO case from the San Fransisco Chronicle, who isn't such of a name brand as a real investigative reporter. So what's the focus here? Getting names like Rick Reilly or breaking investigations in sports?

The focus is to be as good and authoritative and as entertaining as we can possibly be. Mark Fainaru-Wada is half of the writing team that produced The Game of Shadows and T.J. Quinn from the New York Daily News are the kind of talented journalists we've always pursued. Rick Reilly is the kind of storyteller and engaging personality that we've always pursued.

If you think about 2007, in one far end of things, you had the explosion of fantasy. All things fantasy. And the other end of things, you had a lot of harsh reality. And all the games that happened on the field are somewhere in between. But sports media entities are really judged by how the handle the extremes. In a year that saw performance enhancing drugs and Michael Vick's mistreatment of dogs and other things that take away from what happens on the field, it may seem much more apparent to people that ESPN is drawing resources from the sports reporting world to help us report that. But the truth of the matter is that that has been going on for some time and any time you have the opportunity to be in the discussion for hard working, thoughtful investigative reporters or hard working, brilliant storytellers, or folks that can engage fans in a way that's unique, you're really in a good position to draw that kind of talent.

When you're talking about engaging fans in a way that's unique, ESPN is one of the few news sources that's trying to do that. There are cutbacks throughout journalism, except in sports. So why is ESPN putting such a premium on [journalism]?

Well, I think there are a lot of cutbacks in a lot of areas and that's just really unfortunate thing that's going on. A great many friends are soldiering through with a lot of upheaval. ESPN is really mindful of trying to be authoritative, trying to be there for fans. It's not a question so much of understanding that's there's an opportunity at the expense of other media, it's really something that ESPN has been about for a long time. … We really care about telling the story of NASCAR as well as we possibly can.