Ana Marie Cox, a founding editor at Wonkette who’s now a political columnist at The Guardian, is probably the biggest journalism star we’ve had on the podcast. To celebrate, we divided this episode into two parts. In part one this week, we talk about the pen that’s tattooed on her forearm and what it means to her, why television punditry is a strange business, and how she went from suck.com to becoming one of the biggest political reporting stars in this country.
Plus, we discuss the infamous Washingtonienne story, how Cox as Wonkette handled it, and how she had become powerful enough as a journalist to have the access to land a story like that.
One of the reasons I started following John Walters on Twitter — maybe the main reason — is because I loved that this former Sports Illustrated writer was tweeting about how he was waiting tables at a New York City steakhouse. Well, Walters has accomplished much more in his life than serving food for a big-ass tip. Instead, the two-time Sports Emmy winner recently landed a job at Newsweek, and he still writes daily for his own site, HappyMedium.com.
During our chat, we discuss how much easier it is to get interviews or call-backs from people when they know ESPN.com or the New York Times is calling and the cache those publications bring, what it was like clawing his way up from the bottom at Sports Illustrated, and why the iPad-only newspaper — The Daily — was a little ahead of its time.
Plus, we talk about his feelings on SI’s Oklahoma State college football story that caused such a controversy last September, and Walters tells me about why he went into the restaurant business as a waiter and why he loves it so much.
I’ve always known Dorie Turner Nolt as a journalist, and her credentials were impressive. But when she took a job as the press secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, I knew I needed her as a guest on the podcast. In our chat, we talk about the consequences of a journalist going to the “dark side” world of public relations, how she views a reporter’s job now that her paradigm has shifted, how the Associated Press (her former employer) has adjusted to a new age of journalism, and why she would uproot her life for a job she knows she’s not going to have in three years after the current presidential administration leaves office.
Plus, you need to hear her story on how she became the Chattanooga Times Free Press’ 9/11 reporter as a 22-year-old fresh out of college. Frankly, Turner provides one of the best stories we’ve ever heard on this podcast.
And at the end, I couldn’t help but tell my shaking-hands-with-George-W-Bush story that gets a little explicit at the end (and not because of anything President Bush did).
I read ESPN.com’s Dan Rafael all the time, and if you follow boxing in the slightest, I’m sure you do the same. Rafael is at all the big fights, conducts epic chats that have gone as long as the common work day and breaks a tremendous amount of news. In our talk, we discuss the media coverage that boxing gets these days (hint: it doesn’t get nearly the mainstream coverage it once did, but it’s probably easier to find boxing news than ever before) and how he created his own world (not unlike T.J. Simers) with his ESPN.com boxing chats. We also hit on how he goes about trying to “own” his beat, and whether he has misgivings about making his living writing about men who hit each other in the head.
Plus, we talk about the time we briefly shared space in a hotel suite in Louisville with Mike Tyson — one of the most surreal moments of my sports writing career and one of my most favorite stories of all time.
This might be the most important podcast I’ve recorded to date. Claire Smith, formerly of the New York Times and currently of ESPN.com, is a trailblazer in our journalism world. In the 1970s and 1980s, she was one of the first female reporters to enter a baseball clubhouse, and she had to traverse a rocky road to do her job at the time. During our discussion, we chat about the recent ESPN documentary “Let Them Wear Towels” and why it was so important, the fine line she had to walk between sticking up for herself and not becoming part of an explosive story, and whether female reporters will ever get 100 percent equal treatment.
Plus, you MUST hear the story of how she was physically removed from the Padres clubhouse during the playoffs in 1984 and how that incident shaped her then and how it continues to shape her. It is an amazing tale, and quite frankly, Smith is an amazing (and brave) journalist.
A few days ago, Smith tweeted this to me:
@joshkatzowitz Josh, it was an honor to be invited to participate on the MTTS podcast. Thanks, again.
Of course, she’s got it wrong. It was me who was honored to have her grace my podcast.
My favorite quote came when she was discussing her trailblazing colleagues, who paved the way for those who came afterward: “Being able to pick up the phone and talk to Jane Gross, or Melissa Ludtke or Lisa Olson, that made the world then. It means even more now. I look around the group and all I see are survivors and some of the greatest people I’ve ever known in my life.”
Interviewed on 12-19-13
Chris Huston is the foremost authority on the Heisman Trophy. At least that’s what Sports Illustrated says, and there’s no reason not to believe it. Huston gets the winner right every time. Every single damn time.
In our discussion, we talk about why the Heisman Trust is so against Heisman voters revealing their votes before the ceremony and whether that should be a problem for the journalists who are voting, how Huston transformed himself into a top-notch Heisman voter analyst, and the process by which a school’s PR department figures out when to push one of its own football players for the award.
Josh Sneed is one of the funniest guys I know. Which is good, because he makes his living as a stand-up comedian. I’m fascinated by the art of comedy, so I was really excited to book Sneed for a chat. In our talk, we discuss the career ambition of a comedian who has a family and doesn’t live on either coast, how he went from working as a systems analyst for Procter & Gamble to starring in his own half-hour special on Comedy Central, and Sneed’s process for writing jokes and bits.
Plus, Sneed tells us the emotional story of his two tryouts for Last Comic Standing and how a conversation with Drew Carey a decade ago continues to inspire him.
Here are a few clips of Sneed on the stage, and here’s the story I ended up writing for Soapbox Media during that trip to Louisville I took with Sneed, Jenny and Jack Sneed.
When we talked last month, it was late Monday night for me and early Tuesday morning for Steve Elling, and throughout our conversation, the former CBSSports.com national golf writer turned ex-pat sports writer in the United Arab Emirates talked about the oddities of his life these days. During our chat, we discuss the culture shock he’s experienced while living in Abu Dhabi, what it’s like to work for a government-owned newspaper, and how he’s had to tighten up his copy now that he’s gone from writing for the Internet back to writing for a newspaper.
Plus, we talk about if he successfully connects with those who read him in the country in which he lives, his relationship with Tiger Woods, and about the reality of the golf writer clique.
The only time I’ve talked to Will Carroll was during a rainy night in Louisville when we were trying to watch a Cuban phenom pitch in the minor leagues. That was three years ago, and since then, Carroll has become this country’s most renowned sports medicine writer. In our chat, we discuss how he found his online niche, why he thinks the HGH soap opera of the last five years is the most overblown sports storyline perhaps ever, and how a reporter who deals in injuries builds up his source list.
I’ve known Mack Williams for about 13 years, and I’ve always been amazed by his design skills, and though I’ve never seen a full episode of Archer, he was one of the main contributors for the first few years of that FX show. During our chat, we discussed why people love Archer so much (hint: he said it’s the writing, not the animation), why people of a certain generation still are enamored of animated shows even after they’ve become grown-ups, what exactly the first years of Archer were like, and the logistics of how an episode is made. Plus, he talks about what it was like to meet his idol, Mad magazine co-founder Jack Davis.
And then …
We morph into a conversation about actual journalism where we discuss editorial cartoonists while lamenting the decline of artists who do that on a local level. Plus, we talk about his band, Attractive Eighties Women.
And just because, here are two Attractive Eighties Women videos.
Here is some of what we talked about (and some of what we didn’t).
Josh Katzowitz - Sports Writer/Author/Editor 