What should sportswriters do now that athletes don’t need them to speak directly to the public?

Ian Casselberry wrote about athletes speaking directly to the public on Awful Announcing.

That’s hardly a new thing. Cristiano Renaldo has almost 33 million Twitter followers. That didn’t happen in a week.

But in a post headlined Golden Tate goes first person to address rumors about Russell Wilson and Percy Harvin, Casselberry notes that the Lions receiver is part of a trend of athletes moving beyond social media and “taking that effort further through ventures where they can post first-person narratives, such as Derek Jeter’s The Players’ Tribune.” Casselberry, who used to write for Bleacher Report, also notes the B/R athlete-video site Uninterrupted.

Tate used the Medium publication The Cauldron to refute some rumors about him and talk about what it’s like to be a famous person about whom salacious rumors get passed around. His basic point, other than “I did not have an affair with Russell Wilson’s wife,” is that you shouldn’t believe everything you read.

Mine is a question: As more and more athletes get more and more sophisticated in their efforts to, in Casselberry’s words, “eliminate the middleman of sports media,” how should sports media respond? With less need to filter and disseminate what sports-world figures have to do, what should sportswriters be replacing that work with?