Episode 237 Snippets: Jacob Feldman of Sportico

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
On episode 237 of the Digital and Social Media Sports Podcast, Neil
chatted with Jacob Feldman, Sports Business Reporter for Sportico.
What follows is a collection of snippets from the podcast. To hear the
full interview and more, check out the podcast on all podcast
platforms and at www.dsmsports.net.
Best Of The Digital and
Social Media Sports Podcast
Episode 237: Jacob Feldman

Jacob’s Career Path
“My career path started in 4th grade. I convinced my parents to let me use the
printer to print out what I called the ‘Neighborhood Newsletter.’ It was a catchy,
inventive name. It was about two or three pages stapled together, sold door-to-
door, a dollar an issue, [and] had a circulation of roughly 40 homes. So I kind of
always knew I wanted to be in writing, in journalism, and kind of wove from
there.
“So, you know, PTA newsletter in middle school, high school newspaper, I
worked on the college newspaper at Harvard and interned with the Boston Globe.
I got an internship with Sports Illustrated after college and then landed at
Sportico a little over two and a half years ago. It's been a lot of fun along the
way.”

On deciding to build a career in journalism and getting into sports
“I showed up at the Crimson, the school newspaper. I knew actually
when I visited in the spring after I'd gotten in, before I had enrolled or
anything, I went by the Crimson, too, knocked on the door and
someone let me in. So I was the eager beaver…And when I got there, I
applied for the news team and got through that whole process, and
then as they were assigning out beats, they're like, ‘Oh, you know
about sports. Why don't you be our sports news reporter?’ So I kind of
got pushed off to that side of things and I was working on the sports
desk as well. That was basically how I became the sports reporter.

“Then from there my first summer I wrote a little bit for the Winston-
Salem Journal, the very small local newspaper where I grew up. The
next summer I interned at the Charlotte Observer. From there I
interned at the Miami Herald and then the Washington Post. So I just
worked my way up slowly through those markets. I applied I think
probably for 40 internships a year. That was the path as far as I saw
it, it wasn't that long ago, we’re talking about 10 years ago. Basically,
the path was local newspaper, regional newspaper, national
newspaper. Now it's so different. But for me it was kind of nice to
have that very clear path in front of me of here's how you can make
your way through this world.”

On sticking with journalism as the industry started to ebb and evolve
“Well, I think I was very fortunate the time that I hit all that stuff because I got to these
newspapers that, like you said, had gone through layoffs and had fewer reporters than they ever
did, so they had to, by necessity, take a 17-18-year-old and say, ‘Alright go cover the NBA Finals’
when the Spurs were in town [in Miami]. ‘Write about how fans are reacting to LeBron leaving
that summer.’ That's something I don't think an intern would've gotten to do 10 or 15 years ago
at a place like the Miami Herald, which was a massive newspaper and still is big.
“The other benefit is a lot of the editors were still there. One of the most important people in my
path was an editor at the Charlotte Observer. My real internship was [with] someone who had
worked in that world for 30 years, maybe more, and [they were] happy to sit down with me and
walk through my stories and really teach me how to do this. So I feel like I got the best of both
worlds there, getting the opportunity and also getting that mentorship. I think it within two or
three years it got a lot harder to do that just because, like you said, those places changed so
rapidly.”

On homing in on the type of journalism he wanted to do
“That's a good question. I basically did all of it, to be honest, kind of being the
freshman or the sophomore on some of these beats, like men's basketball and
football — you don't get to choose which of those buckets you're gonna fill. So I
kind of got a chance to taste from all of them. I did a little bit of the investigative
stuff — I don’t know if you recall, but there was a pretty sizable cheating scandal
at Harvard, the news broke my sophomore year, that impacted over 100
students, including a lot of athletes. So that was my jump into the investigative
world. It wasn't really for me, although I totally respect people who do that. But
for me, what always grabbed me was profiles, features, a chance to really dive
into something, learn about a world that I didn't know anything about, and get
to teach something at the end of the process is really what I enjoyed the most.

“But I think to get to that point, it helps to write columns. It helps to
write what we call notebooks or analytical pieces. It helps to write
game stories; I did plenty of those where we needed a story up when
the buzzer sounds of the basketball game or when the final whistle
blows the football game, and just getting that muscle of being able to
write 400 words in five minutes, you know is important, too.”

On starting out with Sports Illustrated
“It was pretty scary just showing up there because I hadn’t interned there
or anything, I started as a fact checker basically, which is how most
people started at that point. So they set you down, they give you the style
book and the fact checking guide, and they say, ‘Alright.’ [And] you're off.
“I think the first story I fact-checked was a profile of Kobe Bryant and
some young player who had joined the Lakers that year, maybe D'Angelo
Russell, by Lee Jenkins, you know, one of the great NBA writers at the
time. And that was it, you were off. They really just let you learn to swim,
learn to fly, whatever it is, and you work your way up slowly from there.

“But everyone there, a lot of people had gone through that same
process. Grant Wahl was somebody who had been a fact checker and
had become, you know, this big soccer writer by the time I got there; a
lot of people had taken those steps, so they understood where you are.
They were understanding of the mistakes that you make and they all
have this belief that you have the ability to do that, and that was really
powerful and really helpful for me early on.”

On what being a fact checker entails
“It’s an eye-opening experience. It definitely changes the way you read stuff,
especially online, fact-checking things. You just realize how inaccurate a lot of stuff
you read online is when you're trying to find a date or a weight or a time, and there
are four different answers in four different stories. It goes back to what we were
saying before about [how quick] the pace of writing is now is [that] there often isn't
time to fact check. So I came to quickly understand, okay, maybe 50%, maybe 80% of
what you read on the internet is probably wrong in some way. So that was eye-
opening.
“You do find the sources that are trustworthy and you do kind of figure out the way to
line two things up and say, okay, let's trust this one over that one, or let's go back and
ask them which of these is correct, and you figure out the way to do it over time.”

On developing and moving into the sports business beat with Sportico
“It was a pretty big jump, mainly just in terms of the audience. You
know, at Sports Illustrated, I'm writing for sports fans and at Sportico
I'm writing for people generally who work in sports or who are very
knowledgeable about the sports business. I didn't study business or
economics or anything, I studied history in college, so just the
business aspect of it was a learning curve of what are earnings, what is
market cap, what are all these words people take for granted, and just
kind of getting up to speed on that was the biggest challenge of that
transition. And one that I think will be helpful for me long term of
having that background now.

“When it comes to [developing] sources, I think everybody probably does it
differently, and the most important thing is whatever is most comfortable to
you, or the avenues that feel easiest to you or the ones I would pursue. Whether
that is cold emailing or DMing people saying, ‘Hey, I'm writing in this world, I
just wanna get smarter. I'm not working on anything specific. Would just love to
hear what's interesting to you or what you wanna read more about.’
Introductions like that can get the ball rolling. Oftentimes for me, it's helpful
when I am working on a specific story; [for example], this week I wrote about
sports bars and how they're adjusting to the streaming landscapes, so I could
reach out to all these experts in that world and say, ‘Hey, I'm writing this, would
love your help.’ And oftentimes this is true in sports business, I'm guessing it's
true in most industries — people do want to help. People want to tell you about
why their little corner of the industry is fascinating and interesting.

“So when you can do that, and then when you can quote them in a
story, that, to me, I feel like has often been the easiest way to start to
build relationships or to build trust. Then you can go back to them,
you know, every three months, six months, whatever, and check in
what's interesting in the space, what's not being written about and
just making that process as natural as possible I think makes it more
productive.”

On deciding on the stories to pursue and areas to cover
“I think it's both very complicated and very simple. At the very simple level, it's just
stuff I wanna be reading about, stuff I'm curious about. It's often I'll Google
something and I don't find a clear answer to it, I'm like, ‘Okay, well maybe there's a
story there. If I'm Googling it, there's probably someone else out in the world
Googling it, and maybe I can be the one to find the answer and write it and become
that search result.’ So that's the simple version of it.
“Then after that, there is a more complex version of trying to pitch it to editors, trying
to craft the angle so it's specific and not this gangly mess of things. I may be writing
about this again, but to me, there are a lot of elements of this sports bar question of —
the next generation doesn't root for sports in the same ways, they don't drink or hang
out in the same ways. There are all these different trends that are shaping things.

“But for this story, it was simple to say, ‘Okay, let's just look at this one
problem of everything used to be on DirecTV [and] now not everything is on
DirecTV, right? What does that mean?’ You know, boil it down to one
question, one answer and that's usually easiest for one story. That process
can be hard depending on what type of thing you're covering. Then from
there, it's a matter of just figuring out who are the experts, where are the
changes, where are the controversies and the flash points of an issue. And
that just comes from talking to as many people as you can, and then at the
end of the day, sometimes the hardest part is synthesizing that down,
boiling down what everybody's told you. Sometimes it's conflicting,
sometimes they don't know all the answers, and figuring out, ‘Okay, here's
what I actually know. Here's what's actually interesting,’ and put that in a
piece.”

On evaluating the success of a story
“It's a great question. I don't know if anybody has the right metric there. As you mentioned,
there are a bunch you can turn to. For me, my best stories, my favorite stories are the ones
that start a conversation. Whether that's something that leads to changes in the industry —
that'd be awesome — someone reads this and says, ‘Oh, that's a great idea for a business. I'm
gonna launch a business and solve this problem.’ Whether it's just somebody, you know, the
next time I have a phone call somebody [says] ‘Oh, that was interesting. I hadn't thought
about that. Did you think about this?’ X and Y, you know, back and forth. To me, the best
stories start a conversation, they don't end a conversation, if that makes sense.
“So I'm not trying to solve this, I'm not trying to put a period on something. I'm trying to
say, there's something interesting going on here, something's still being figured out; it's not
for me to get there, but it's for me to say, ‘Hey, you know what's going on here?’ And then let
folks take it from there.”

On the audience Jacob is writing for
That's a good question. I don't think too much about that aspect of it when
I'm deciding what to write; as I said, I think if it's interesting to me, I'm
hopeful that it will be interesting to people in the C-suite, but also to people
lower down in the organization. At the end of the day, I think if we are
impacting that top-level conversation, that's where you wanna be. That's
where you're the most important and most valuable, and you become kind
of a must-have resource and a must-read every day. But I think for me, I
wouldn't really want to put that kind of bar on a story because it's probably
too hard to predict, I think. And if you're just writing about what they're
talking about all the time, you're probably closing yourself off from some
ideas and maybe deserve to be part of that conversation.”

On how Jacob saw sports business and fan engagement change
during the pandemic and what will stay/go
“[There are] a million things I could say. I think for me when I
started, I covered the NFL for a little while at Sports Illustrated. I
wrote up this one-page, maybe two-page document of what I wanna
be covering is how sports media is changing the way teams and fans
connect is changing. And one of the first responses I got from that
[was] from an editor who I won't name, was like, ‘Is there really
enough there to write about consistently? Are you sure that's not a
story and not a beat?’

“Three years later I look at these things and as you mentioned the pandemic was a huge
factor in this, it's changing so rapidly from the media angle, from team fan engagement,
from merchandising, I've written a good amount about collectibles and NFTs and that
whole transition — all these things are moving to become digital in a way that they
weren't Sports, I think in a lot of ways is one of the fastest-moving industries because it
is a little bit smaller than some other big things, but it's also a fairly slow moving
industry in a lot of other ways. So to see those changes happen, basically overnight,
during the pandemic, was really fascinating. And now we're kind of seeing a proving
point of are these things worth keeping. Are they worth pushing forward on it? Should
we put these ideas back on the shelf and maybe they weren't ready yet?
“So we're still kind of in that process, but it was definitely a huge shake-up point and an
opportunity to pull forward for a lot of technologies, and I think we're still trying to
figure out exactly what the ultimate impact of that period will be.”

On the changing business models and revenue streams and
opportunities in sports
“I think at the base of a lot of it is a concern, a fear, that the next
generation of sports fans or the next generation of possible sports
fans are getting better experiences elsewhere. Whether that's Netflix,
whether it's Snapchat, whether it's TikTok, YouTube — you know, 30
years ago if you were an 18-year-old and you wanted to be entertained
on a Monday night, you watched football. That was what was on,
that's what your friends were talking about. Now you have thousands
of other things to spend time on. Video games is another massive
competitor that I didn't mention there.

“I think that has been the biggest driver of teams, leagues, players, media
networks, all saying, okay, how do we, whether it's looking more or working
more like those new things are, or just improving our product so that it can
compete with those things I think is the biggest driver.
”Then the second thing, that you touched on a little bit, COVID was a big
part of this, is recognizing how much money is being left on the table from
fans who don't live within a hundred miles of the stadium. Whether that's
international, whether that's just kind of national, that's been changing a lot
in terms of what teams are able to do. Obviously, technology has allowed
them to reach those fans and monetize those fans.
“I think those are kind of the two biggest drivers of change right now.”

On sports business seeking to maximize the live window and games vs. investing
in fan engagement opportunities in the time and content beyond games
“It's a great question. I think the leagues don't view it separately as maybe you
posed the question there. If we have people hooked all the time, they're gonna
watch our live games, and hopefully, if they watch our live games, they're gonna
stick around and watch stuff or interact the rest of the time. So it's competing for
attention. It's also competing for identity. Like, people who are young people in
the world, young adults, maybe just out of college, trying to decide who they
wanna be, what are they gonna put in their Twitter profile and their Instagram
profile? Are they gonna put Warriors fan or are they gonna put Fortnite player?
Once you determine who you are and what you do, everything else kind of comes
from that.

“So I think if local teams or athletes are able to kind of say you're a
LeBron James fan, that's who you are, then you can build from that
and you're gonna have them hooked for life to watch your live games,
to watch your highlights, recaps, off-season, everything if you can
start there…It's a huge power curve actually.”

On web3 and NFTs and how Jacob has seen that play out in sports
“I think the NFT thing, and I wrote this a month ago or so, looking
back at [NBA] Top Shot and, and how it exploded and what the
impact was. Short term I think that the NFT craze was probably bad
for consumer adoption of this technology because it blew up and then
it blew up in a bad way, and people were able to look at it and say,
‘Okay, that was never worth my time. I'm just gonna move on. I'm not
gonna try to figure out what NFTs or the blockchain are.’ I think
there's a huge portion of the country that decided that.

“But at the same time, I think in front offices in sports business,
people looked at it and said, ‘Oh, there's a massive opportunity here.’
So in the long term, I think that explosion will be good for the
adoption of this technology because there is, as you mentioned, such a
benefit. I think about the Green Bay Packers and their quote-unquote
stock sale; I think they sold $60 million in quote-unquote stock this
year or last year. And it's meaningless, right? It’s a piece of paper. It
doesn't give you any power. Maybe it gets you an invitation to some
sort of like yearly Zoom meeting. I'm not sure, I'm sure there are
benefits to it. And maybe people raise an eyebrow at that, but it's kind
of understood that it makes you feel like you're part of the Packers.
That’s it.

“To me that is the value that NFTs have as well, an additional front
that can be more valuable because you can use them to unlock more
benefits. I think you could be in a chat platform, whether it's Discord
or whatever, only with the other hardcore fans that bought the same
player, NFT or whatever. And it's a confirmation of identity, it's a way
to lock that in if you're the team and it's a way to build on that. It's a
way to reward those people. So I think there is a massive potential
there. We're not there yet. You know, there's a lot of complicated
decisions and products that need to be built. I think we're probably
three to five years away from that vision of all this stuff kind of being
brought together.

“I'm a big Atlanta Hawks fan. The Atlanta Hawks don't know who I
am, don't know that I'm a Hawks fan and at some point that's
frustrating, right? Like, in every other way I go about life — I play
Magic the Gathering sometimes when I have some free time, and
Wizards of the Coast — the people who put that game out, they know
who I am. They have my email, they message me, I get rewards, all
these kinds of things. I don't get that for spending hundreds of hours
watching the Hawks, reading about the Hawks, talking about the
Hawks. I'm a massive evangelist for this brand and I get nothing back
from it. So I think NFTs hopefully were a wake-up call that teams
need to be doing more in that world to connect with fans [like that].”

On the intersection of web3 and fan loyalty and rewards programs
“I mean, we could talk about this for two hours, I'm really fascinated
about this question. There are a lot of different kinds of rewards
programs you mentioned. The most obvious one is, you know, you get
5% back on every purchase in some form of points that you can then
spend. That's kind of the easiest way to do it.

“Another version is a membership style, like [Amazon] Prime or all these
other things where you spend $100 a year [and] you're part of this product
or community or whatever, and you get benefits from that. There's a new
version of that — I think Spotify is a great example of this with the
‘Wrapped’ that comes out every year. I haven't written about this yet…But
think about what a sports version of that might look like. If you could tell
me how many hours of each player I watched, how many touchdowns I saw,
how many Aaron Judge home runs I caught, how many debates I got in,
which take I was the wrongest on — all these sort of things and packaged my
year in fandom. There is nothing like that. So it just feels oftentimes like
you're just — if your team doesn't win it all — you leave the stadium
unhappy so many times. I think it's just that waste of time factor of like,
what did I put in here?

“So giving fans a sense of achievement that they're building towards
something, that they're getting closer to the team, that the team hears
them and respects them and appreciates their support. I ended that
story talking about fan appreciation night. Teams, when they're
having a bad year, towards the end of the season will have a fan
appreciation night and maybe it's half off hotdogs or something and a
bobblehead. But every night should be fan appreciation night. That is
your entire business. The idea that, you know, you'd only do that one
night a year or one week a year is I think pretty backwards. And it is
changing, so I'm excited to see what form that takes.”

On the evolving nature of fandom and rooting for a favorite team
“It's a great question. Because I think this is a big part of my story that
I ended up cutting. I think, going back to what we were saying before
about just focus on one thing. Because right now, because we're not
getting that kind of experience from our team, we're getting it
elsewhere. And fantasy [sports] is the clearest example of this. Like, I
have a fantasy team, and I go up and down with that team. You know,
I have Josh Jacobs and, and Daniel Carlson [on my fantasy team],
they had a great Thursday night game [one night]. I was excited, I was
watching that game, and fantasy is a great example of that.

“Betting is another one, like you said, where it gets you invested. But you're
not invested in the team. And this is where I think I differ from some people
— I know some of my colleagues have different opinions on this, and maybe
they're right, maybe they're not — I don't think it builds real loyalty. And
while a lot of these sportsbooks might have the same incentives as teams
right now in terms of getting people to tune into games or getting them
more invested in a team or season or game, that's not always gonna be the
case. I mean, we've seen already a lot of these companies saying ‘My online
casino is actually more financially effective because you make better odds
and all that, so maybe I'll just try to move my sportsbook people into that
world. Or maybe I'll even create my own digital football games that people
can bet on so that I can run them 365.’ Sports doesn't have a monopoly on
these things.

“And especially the more they let sportsbooks or fantasy platforms
mediate that relationship, I think the more danger they put
themselves in. It kind of reminds me of, going back 15 years ago, what
the movie studios did with Netflix, right? They were like, ‘Oh, if we
put these movies on Netflix, we'll make a little extra cash. People will
be able to watch them a little more easily. Maybe they'll become fans
of our franchise and they'll come to movie theaters.’ And then all of a
sudden it's like, no, people are now Netflix fans. They're not fans of
what you guys are doing. I think that you run the same risk if you're
relying on these other platforms to generate excitement and
investment rather than doing it directly.”

“I didn't mention this in the story, but yeah Marvel has its own fan
rewards program, right? You move up the levels and you get special
wallpapers and you get all these things. There are all sorts of other
ways, other things you can be a fan of. You can be a fan of a certain
novelist and you're reading their books and you're talking to friends.
There's all these sorts of different things that you can build
community around these days, so I think sports just have to continue
to keep up and compete with those other realms.”

On the sports industry being a leader or a follower when it comes to innovation
and technology
“I think it depends what vertical you're looking at, but I would put it more in that
latter category, and before I really got into this beat, I definitely would've put it in
that latter category. I think I've seen some examples where sports are faster, and
the other thing is I've recognized there are other industries that are even slower
moving. You know, I wrote about the origins of Top Shot. The founder of Dapper
Labs [the company that makes Top Shot] wasn't a huge sports fan, maybe wasn't
a sports fan at all. And they had all these ideas. They launched these
CryptoKitties, these cats that you could breed on the blockchain, and they were
looking to do something like that but with some IP behind it. And they talked to
dozens of companies — movie studios, I think everybody in the web3 world [was]
like Pokemon on the blockchain makes a ton of sense, right?

“But these other industries move a lot slower than sports. Like sports
[was], like, ‘Oh yeah, we'll try that. It's kind of like sports cards,
whatever, we'll give it a go.’ So there are some examples, but for the
most part, sports is slow, I think we've seen, and entertainment in
general. I look at like ticketing is a great example. It hasn't changed
that much, even as the world around it has changed a ton, the season
ticket model has not changed that much. The media model in terms of
just how to watch games is very slowly moving to where the rest of
entertainment was five years ago.

“So I think whether sports is being dragged or sports are finally
coming around to some of these innovations, it is happening now.
And we can go back to the pandemic thing — I think that was a big
push. It's also just kind of where the money is, right? You know,
Apple and Amazon have the money, so they're gonna be the things
that are gonna be slowly gaining a bigger and bigger foothold in
sports. But it was slow in the past. I think it is speeding up, but they
still have a way to go to catch up to some of these other industries,
especially as we start talking about metaverse and VR and all these
new technologies.”

On the rapid cycles and ups and downs of new technologies,
especially framed with the NFT bubbles and crypto crashes
“I think a lot of times these things are experiments and sports treats
them that way. And when they blow up, they don't have the
infrastructure or the oomph or the momentum to continue to develop
things and then they slowly fade away. And other times they don't
blow up and people say, ‘Okay, well, you know it wasn't, we're trying’
when in fact if they invested more into it, it could have been better.

“I think sports are generally fairly conservative on these things
[because they think], we have a good business, our values are going
up, people love us, [and] we don't wanna risk that. Then every once in
a while when they do and it goes poorly, like, okay, we're definitely
not risking that, we're done. So that I think can be frustrating to me as
somebody who would like to see a lot more innovation, but I also
totally understand the other side of, you know, these companies are —
for as central as they are to our culture, they're not that big of
companies, right? The staffs of these teams are not that big, the ticket
sales departments of these teams are not that big. They have a
business to run.

“A lot of those departments were cut back over the last couple years,
so I understand they're not gonna want to destroy everything. And a
lot of times their most diehard fans are maybe in their 60s or 70s and
have been fans for 50 years, you're not gonna wanna change the way
they interact. So there are totally reasons to be conservative, but I
think it's hard to argue that you sports aren't more slow moving or
experimental rather than just diving into things left and right. I mean,
you look at the way Facebook totally pivoted their entire company to
Meta. Like, you're not gonna see the NFL pivot their entire business
tomorrow. It's just not the way the league works.”

About the Sunday Long Read that Jacob co-founded and co-leads with veteran
sports reporter Don Van Natta Jr.
“So the quick pitch [for] Sunday Long Read — every week we send an email
newsletter, on Sunday mornings [with] the best journalism of the week. We've
been doing it since 2014, [from] the beginning it was me and Don Van Natta, [a]
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter previously at the New York Times, now at ESPN.
He had just been tweeting out stories, on Saturdays or Sundays and then
someone responded to a tweet saying, ‘Have you thought about turning this into
a newsletter?’ And I responded saying I had never talked to him before in my life,
but I enjoyed these recommendations, said ‘Hey, I run our Harvard Crimson
newsletter on MailChimp, I can totally set you up.’ And I thought that was gonna
be it. You know, I could set him up with the newsletter, teach him how to do it,
and off he'd go.

“But he was very generous [saying] ‘Hey, you wanna do this with me?’ So now I
help pick the stories and everything. And it's really been valuable for me as a
writer and as a reader. It forces me to read these long stories that otherwise I
might not give myself time for. And that's ultimately the mission of the Sunday
Long Read is to say let's take a step back. Maybe it's an hour on Sunday or if it's
another hour on the week that you can carve out, that's great, and read the stuff
that we don't spend time on, the stuff that slips through the cracks of our
attention when we're too obsessed with, you know, Twitter and takes and what's
happening right now.
“And I think the reading has been extremely valuable for me as a writer. So trying
to put it all in one place for other potential writers or just people who've missed
that joy of reading that’s so hard to carve out time for is ultimately what we're
after.”

The most memorable story Jacob wrote during his time with the
Harvard Crimson
“Going back to what we were talking about [with] writing stories at
the buzzer, I wrote a game story - this was the Princeton game at
Princeton, homecoming for [them] in 2012. Harvard was winning the
game. I don't remember the score, it was something like 32-10
maybe…Long story short, it ended up being one of the biggest
comebacks in college football history. Princeton won 39-34. They
came back from 24 down in the fourth quarter. It was Harvard's first
loss in 15 games and changed the balance of power in the Ivy League…

“That was a story where I had something written at the beginning of
the fourth quarter, things were marching along and all of a sudden
the script is flipped. We had a debate [during] the drive all the way
back about whether it was a great game. You know, the fact that
Harvard lost, whether it was still a great game or you could call it an
amazing game. I think at the end of the year the paper would decide
whether something was ‘game of the year,’ and we were debating,
well, could a loss really be game of the year? I don't actually
remember where we came down on that debate, but it's still
something I think about. And, you know, you only get to cover those
kinds of games so often in a career, so I was, I was honored to get to
cover that one, even though it was a loss.”

The most memorable game during Jacob’s time at Harvard
“When you finish your time at the Harvard Crimson, you get the opportunity to
write a closing column, a final word. It's got some name I don't remember. And I
wrote about the power of these losses, the way losses really stick with you more
than wins, and what that means. Maybe losses are actually more powerful in
some ways than wins.
“So the other game that sticks out to me is the March Madness game, Harvard vs.
UNC, I believe it was the 13 vs. 4 game, maybe 14 vs. 3, and it came down to a
final shot. Our best player had it at the top of the key and shoots a three, it rattles
off the rim and is out and we lose. I still think if we win that game, maybe we
make a deep run. Maybe it changes the course of Harvard basketball history
potentially. So that's a shot that I still think about as well.”

Jacob’s favorite story he got to work on and be part of while at Sports
Illustrated
“My first story, you always remember your first, was about what it feels like
to get sacked. After the fact, I realized why I was given this assignment, but
basically my job was to cob a bunch of the quarterbacks who have been
sacked the most in NFL history, and ask them what it felt like, what their
worst one was, what the next morning was like — just all these things they
probably hate to revisit. And for other strange reasons we don't need to get
into. David Carr is one of my favorite quarterbacks, so I tried to reach out to
him. I don't think he got back to me for that story. Jon Kitna was up there. I
believe Randall Cunningham was up there, Brett Favre was up there also, I
don't think he responded. But that was a lot of fun.

“But the most memorable story I got to write was about a woman named Christy
Martin, who was the first female boxer to be on the SI cover, I think was in the ‘90s,
and her life took some crazy turns after that. She was a closeted lesbian who had
married her coach as kind of a cover, and towards the end of her career when she
decided it was time to come out, she had fallen in love with this woman, her coach/
husband ultimately ended up shooting her in their home and leaving her for dead.
She crawled out of the house, flagged down a car, got to the hospital; they managed
to save her life, and she ultimately got back in the ring for one more fight.
“So that was a really impactful story that I got to write. And I was honored that she
kind of gave me the permission [for] that the openness as a young writer to get to
tell that story. It's obviously very different than my lived experience, but it's
something I think about a lot and really a story I was very glad to get the
opportunity to tell that story.”

About the role social media plays in Jacob’s career
“It's constantly changing. I think for me [and my career], when it comes to social
media, it's basically Twitter and Twitter. I don't really use a ton of other platforms, but
I'm starting to use LinkedIn a little bit more. But it does, like you said from start to
finish, in terms of finding people to talk to, finding potential angles — I do turn to social
media for that as much as I turn to people I know and texting people and calling people
and asking them who I should be talking to.
“Then the flip side of that is promotion. I go in waves, like, maybe I should be spending
more time on here and and really trying to build up my profile and tweeting
consistently and interacting with people and trying to build a following. And other
times I'm like, oh, this is kind of all a waste of time and maybe we should just focus on
the stories and let that be the guide. So I waffle back and forth. I'm still trying to figure
out the right equilibrium.” =

Jacob’s number one piece of advice for aspiring writers
“My number one piece of advice is to find a niche to really focus on. When I
taught a sports class at Brandeis, I did a class or two on this topic of how to
find your way into the industry, how, how to think about building a career.
And my advice when it came to finding a niche is like, what is it that your
friends just tell you to shut up about? Like, what are you finding people
don't want to hear you talk about? Because if you're so invested in that, you
care so much about that, I'm willing to bet there are — maybe it's only a
thousand other people in the world, but the world's a big place and a
thousand people is enough to build a career on who also care about that
small issue. Whether that's analytics in a small sport, or whether it's the
economics of swimming. You can make it anything you want.

“And then the other part of that is, we kind of had the students do
this, it was kind of like a grid. So you pick a sport or subject area, you
pick the way you're gonna cover it — maybe you're gonna focus on
analytics or you're gonna focus on the people — and then you pick the
platform. I think if you can be specific in each of those three
categories, you're gonna find yourself very quickly doing something
that's totally unique and eventually valuable enough that whether
someone hires you to do it or whether you're able to build a business
for yourself around it, I think will be sustainable.”

What does Jacob think the future of journalism looks like
“Storytelling is maybe more important than ever because there are so
many different ways to do it [and] so many people that are hungry for
it. Like, we spend more time ingesting stories of various forms each
day than I'm sure humans have ever done in the past. You used to
maybe spend, you know, 30 minutes around the campfire at the end
of the day, or maybe you got the newspaper in the morning and now
literally all day you are getting stories in one form or another. Maybe
it's a push notification, maybe it's a chat message, whatever it is. So
there's more surface area to find your way to carve in some space and
make yourself part of people's routines.

“What that form takes goes back to what I said in the previous answers — whatever
you feel like you're best at it, if you feel like you're best at telling stories in a video
format on YouTube or maybe shorter on TikTok, fantastic, figure out the way to do
that. And if you figure out that writing and words is what you enjoy, what you think
you're best at, yeah, there are newsletters, there are social media platforms like
Twitter, there are online publications like Sportico. There's a million different ways
to, once you have the skills, to figure out the best avenue to pursue them. I'm really
excited about what form it takes. There's a ton of new business models. It's a lot
easier now than ever to build your own business. There's all these tools that'll help
you do that, as we've kind of used with Sunday Long Read to some extent.
“So I'm excited to really, rather than having to get shoehorned into being the crime
reporter at the Albany New Herald, you know, you can cover what you want to
cover, and if you do it well, people will find you.”

The best meal to get in NYC and where to get it,
and also the best meal in Winston Salem, NC
(Jacob’s hometown)
“Well, there's a whole family feud behind this as
far as I understand, but there are a couple
barbecue place that's split now, two competing
ones [in Winston Salem]. It's called Real Q now,
it's a small shack down under a hill basically,
[it’s] got the big smokestack on it. That's my
favorite barbecue. It used to be called Little
Richards, but I think they changed their name
after some family infighting. That’s how you
know it's good, right? If the food can survive
some sort of major rupture in the family, they
must be doing something right.

“Then in New York, I'll answer it this
way — I can mention I'm in Boston
now, so when I go back to New York, or
the thing I miss most in Boston that I
try to get every time I go back to New
York is some spicy Asian noodles from
Xi’an Noodles. I used to volunteer at
the Museum of Modern Art and it used
to be a place right around there that I
would always go to… but I think they're
all over the city now. So that's my go-to
when I need a quick lunch when I'm
back in New York.”

According to Jacob, who should be on the Mt. Rushmore of sports writers?
“Gary Smith from Sports Illustrated is on anybody's Mount Rushmore, I would think, so I
would start there. So I got three left. I think Wright Thompson is probably on there for me. I'm
going back to people 10 years ago when I was coming up, with people that I was just reading
and learning from. Somebody who I think that is really underrated, and I've never really talked
to this person, is Elizabeth Merrill, who I think still works for ESPN. I always loved her writing
growing up, she wrote some really powerful stories, and I don't know why she's not more
famous or well-known.
“So that's three. The last spot, there are so many people — Steph Apstein, who covers baseball at
Sports Illustrated is a fantastic reporter and journalist, Jenny Vrentas [at] the New York Times,
Michael Cruz, who actually works for Politico now, so doesn't cover sports too much, but he's
another person I used to read a ton of growing up, Brian Phillips, his essays at Grantland and
then The Ringer is someone I read a ton of. Then Jordan Kisner, who doesn't really write that
much about sports, I think she now works for the Times and the Atlantic, she writes a ton of
good profiles. So that's what, like 10 heads?”

Jacob’s Social Media All-Star to Follow
“So I'm gonna change this up a little bit, I would like to recommend a
newsletter. Going back to what we were talking about before, I'm
reimagining my social media usage. I'm trying to spend less time
quote-unquote reading social media or ingesting and scrolling social
media. I'm trying to spend more time in newsletters, because I think
it's a little bit more proactive. You know, you're choosing what you're
gonna read, you're signing up to get this stuff daily, regularly. You're
building a relationship.

“So, two newsletters I, I wanted to shout out — the first one is Axios
World. Everyone’s heard of Axios, I think the world newsletter is a
little bit undervalued, under-talked about, and to me, it gets me out of
my bubble. You know, they're covering politics in South Africa and
they're covering the environment in China, it's all these very large-
scale stories that otherwise I would hear nothing about it. On one end
that's kind of troubling, it’s like I'm just living my world in this small
little bubble of what app you use to scan your ticket at the stadium
and that's all I think about all day while these massive things are
going on. So it's kind of nice to reconnect with what's happening in
the world, so Axios World is one.

“Then going back, if you're a young writer, if you're someone
interested in writing, George Saunders's Substack is fantastic. He
breaks down short stories and the writing form and does all sorts of
Q&As and stuff. It's a little bit more homeworky, but in a good way,
and I think if you're somebody who is out of journalism school or out
of college and wants to continue to learn to write, that'd be my
recommendation.”

Where to find Jacob and his work on digital/social media
Jacob can be found on @JacobFeldman4 on social platforms, he’s
most active on Twitter
Find his work on Sportico.com and sign up for their newsletters, too
And visit SundayLongRead.com to find the Sunday Long Read
newsletter

@njh287; www.dsmsports.net
Thanks again to Jacob for being so generous with his time to share his
knowledge, experience, and expertise with me!
For more content and episodes, subscribe to the podcast, follow me
on LinkedIn and on Twitter @njh287, and visit www.dsmsports.net.

Episode 237 Snippets: Jacob Feldman of Sportico

Empfohlen

Empfohlen

Weitere ähnliche Inhalte

Ähnlich wie Episode 237 Snippets: Jacob Feldman of Sportico

Ähnlich wie Episode 237 Snippets: Jacob Feldman of Sportico (20)

Mehr von Neil Horowitz

Mehr von Neil Horowitz (17)

Kürzlich hochgeladen

Kürzlich hochgeladen (20)

Episode 237 Snippets: Jacob Feldman of Sportico