Howard Bryant takes over ESPN magazine back page from Chris Jones

Mina worked for Bloomberg prior to working at ESPN. She's good people. Also worked at Fortune prior to Bloomberg. Covered a lot of financial stuff, did investigative work. Won a bunch of awards.

She wrote something about her father and Seahawks on her blog, which helped catch the eye of editors. Slate later published it as well.

http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2014/01/seattle_seahawks_2014_how_a_football_team_brought_me_and_my_father_together.html

 

Well, it matters on some level. No denying that. But if you're talking about writing/reporting at the level where you're winning a National Magazine award or a Pulitzer, I'd say it matters about 10 percent. I can't tell you how many times I get pitches rejected by athletes. Constantly. The kind of stories that win National Magazine awards or Pulitzers are most often about regular people, ideas no one has thought of, and I would contend they're often about people who don't really put a lot of thought into the prestige of magazines, big newspapers, etc. Yeah, I'm sure it matters on some level if you say "I want to write a story about XXXX but I haven't found a magazine that's agreed to publish it yet."

I mean, Pamela Colloff won for feature writing in 2013 for the Innocent Man. Do you think Michael Morton, the subject of the piece, really cared what publication wanted to tell his story? More likely, he cared merely that someone did. Katherine Boo's piece on marriage between poor people in Oklahoma housing projects, which won an ASME, ran in The New Yorker, but do you think the people in it were even familiar with The New Yorker? I think if Boo or Colloff had written for anyone and been curious and dogged enough, they'd have gotten those stories.

Thompson's piece on Jordan (a finalist for an ASME)? Stephen Roderick's piece on Lindsay Lohan and the making of the Canyons (a finalist for an ASME)? Sure, those were certainly helped by them working for ESPN and The NY Times Magazine. No doubt. But I know each of them spent a long, long time cultivating relationships to get the access they got. In Wright's case, he worked on Jordan's people for years.

So yeah, I think it matters. But the pieces that *win* those awards are mostly written about regular people. Jones wrote his second ASME-winning piece about a fairly-anonymous dead marine that no one else seemed to give a damn about. I suspect the Montgomery family would have shared those details with anyone who showed that kind of empathy and patience. Truth is, most writers don't have enough of either.

 

Agree with all of the above. Also important to note that places like ESPN and Esquire can give an enterprising, dogged journalist something better than a recognizable credential and a foot-in-the-access-door -- they can give you the time, freedom and security to pursue difficult, risky assignments.

I think that's far more important than the name on your media badge.