Earlier this year, Tee Higgins, the Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver, struck up a conversation with Ben Baby, an ESPN reporter, in the team’s locker room. Higgins had missed time with a hamstring injury, and fans around Cincinnati were wondering aloud whether he was faking it.

In his sixth season on the Bengals beat, Baby has built trust and rapport with Higgins. He offered an idea: Why not go on the record and explain his point of view?

Higgins agreed, and Baby wrote the story. “It’s an example of how the job is supposed to work,” Baby said.

It’s also part of the decades-old compact between athletes and reporters. Players open their place of business, including where they get dressed, for reporters to act as a conduit between players and fans, bringing increased attention, engagement and — ultimately, ideally — revenue from fans.

But this season, the NFL players union has taken a stand against reporters’ long-accepted access to the locker room. Earlier this month, the union released a statement calling the media policy “outdated” and announcing that players would begin to request that interviews happen outside the locker room.

“Anybody getting dressed for the day, you wouldn’t want a dozen strangers in that area,” said Thomas Hennessy, the long snapper for the New York Jets. “The media stands there; they hover; they talk to each other. It’s honestly just inappropriate.”

It’s not an unreasonable request on its face, considering occupational hazards of giving interviews in your underwear (and the occasional player caught on camera undressed). To the uninitiated, the ritual of half-naked players surrounded by microphones is bizarre if not indecent.

Reporters say it’s critical. It’s where they meet players, chat off the record and collect phone numbers for future reporting. But that fertile reporting ground is drying up across sports. The WNBA closed the locker room to reporters recently, and most college locker rooms were never open. (NBA and Major League Baseball locker rooms remain open before and after every game.)

Cutting off the locker room, reporters said, is an existential threat to their jobs, particularly in an era of media contraction and as many players connect with fans through their own social media and podcasts.

“They don’t want us in the locker room not because of privacy but because they just don’t want to talk to us,” said one reporter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional backlash.

The locker room played a central role in the evolution of the job of sportswriter. Black reporters who covered Jackie Robinson’s debut season were prohibited from dressing rooms and press boxes (two received press cards the following year). It took a lawsuit for women sports reporters to gain access. Locker room access has produced iconic moments like Len Dawson smoking a cigarette during halftime of the Super Bowl, and the scenes from a losing clubhouse after a playoff series produce some of the most evocative writing in the profession.

In recent weeks, the issue has sparked debate across sports, with the Kelce brothers discussing how easy it is not to be seen naked, while other players have taken to social media to decry the awkward dynamics of the locker room.

The NFL’s media policy, set by the league with input from the players and the Pro Football Writers Association, calls for locker rooms to be open for 45 minutes usually three times per week and after games, following a brief cooling down period. During the practice week, reporters usually mill around waiting for a few players — sometimes a new starter, a new acquisition or a player with a big assignment that week — to appear ready to speak. Quarterbacks and other star players often speak on select days in news conferences.

Players can be fined $25,000 if they aren’t available during these sessions. Calvin Watkins, who covers the Dallas Cowboys for the Dallas Morning News and is the president of the PFWA, said the league sent letters to two players last year about violating the policy and one so far this year, though no fines had been issued.

According to George Atallah, assistant executive director of external affairs for the players’ union, players have been looking to change the policy since the pandemic, when locker rooms were closed to media. More recently, younger players, recently out of college, have raised questions about the policy. The union’s executive committee passed a resolution in 2022 and another one earlier this year.

Players can’t kick reporters out of the locker room. Some, though, have been asking media to conduct interviews outside the locker room during the practice week, exercising a right that has existed in the current policy.

Thomas said the union would like reporters out of the locker room: “That’s the ultimate goal,” he said. The union distributed T-shirts to players that read “Let’s Talk Outside” on the front and “Decency=Discussion” on the back.

Some teams have issued new locker room policies that don’t allow filmed interviews during the week, including Atlanta and Kansas City. (Buffalo and Seattle previously had such a policy in place.) Dallas has a policy that prohibits cellphone video in the locker room.

Players on other teams, including Cincinnati and Detroit, have had several players ask reporters to conduct interviews outside the locker room. The majority of teams, however, have not changed protocols.