Monthly Archives: October 2014

Our Favorite Stories, part 3

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I must say that I love conducting these Our Favorite Stories, and version No. 3 — featuring Memphis Commercial Appeal columnist Geoff Calkins, MLB.com columnist Anthony Castrovince and USA Today NFL writer Lindsay Jones — might be the best one so far.

For those who haven’t seen the first two editions of Our Favorite Stories, here’s No. 1 with Scott Michaux, C. Trent Rosecrans, Travis Haney and Marc Lancaster and No. 2 with Paul Dehner, Dan Wetzel and Candace Buckner.

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A quick reminder: I asked the three guests the same five questions.

1) Who is your favorite player/coach to have covered?

2) Who is your least favorite?

3) What’s your favorite story/moment from the road/from the beat?

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4) Who’s your favorite current writer, sports or otherwise?

5) Who’s your all-time favorite writer, sports or otherwise?

You’ve got to hear Calkins’ immense problems covering legendary basketball coach John Calipari (awesome stories contained within), you get to hear about my legendary night in Pittsburgh with Anthony Castrovince in the mid-2000s (and why Castrovince once got the evil eye from Roger Clemens), and why Lindsay Jones draws inspiration from reading the Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins and ESPN.com’s Liz Merrill.

Dana Jacobson, CBS Sports TV/radio host

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Dana Jacobson is a star broadcaster. She worked for ESPN for a decade, anchoring SportsCenter and helping transition Cold Pizza into First Take, before leaving a contract on the table and moving over to the CBS property. During our chat, we talk about the CBS Sports Network’s new all-female sports talk show “We Need To Talk” and how she thinks it’ll play to a national audience, how much Jacobson has to fight the perception from some that women don’t know sports, and why anchoring SportsCenter was such a huge deal (“Wow,” Jacobson remembers saying. “I got here.”).

Plus, we talk about how she survived on making $15,000 per year earlier in her career, and what it’s like for her to be a woman on Twitter on a daily basis.

Interviewed on 9-26-14

Here’s something similar:

Jacobson and I talked plenty about women-in-sports-media issues, and in Episode 22, I had a wonderful time talking to pioneering female sports writer Claire Smith. Plus, I asked Jacobson if she senses a rape culture in sports media, a topic first broached by feminist writer Jessica Luther in Episode 45.