ESPN Interview

On Wednesday I had an interview with ESPN for a Production Assistant trainee program position. Overall, I think the interview was one of the best I have ever had, but that's probably because we talked about sports pretty much the whole time.

I had to do a critique of an episode of Sportscenter. On 1/12 I chose to do the 6 PM primetime edition. I can't share my entire review per the request of my interviewer, but will share some of my ideas on how to improve the show...



"-Plug your regional .com’s more when there is a story coming out of that city (Canseco on ESPN Radio Chicago) that entire interview needs to be available online before show airs & inform viewers that you can hear the interview in its entirety @ espnchicago.com…”

-Would have liked to seen some college football experts on the show regarding the open USC job. How come no one had a beat on Kiffin going to USC at 5 PM when the story broke at 8 PM? I would expect that your insiders area always more than 2 or 3 hours ahead of the news but understand it’s hard to anticipate when working against deadline.

-Personally, I would have liked to seen a little more variation in the teases. The show was loaded with Pete Carroll and Mark McGwire anyway so why not tease something smaller like “With the World Cup just around the corner, see if your city is in the running to host a World Cup game?” Would have a nice flow into interactive poll on .com

-Again, I really liked having Mike Paul on live but I’m sure 98% of your viewers said “Mike Who?” Why not pull up a little sidebar graphic that shows some of his background that qualifies him as an expert on reputations ie clients present and past, little bit about his agency, website, etc anything that will provide audience with a little visibility on how this guy qualifies as a legitimate person to talk to- if it weren’t for google how would we find out more about him and his agency?

-ESPN bottom line- Whenever women’s scores flash across bottom we viewers often have to do a double take when seeing final scores. Maybe you can change color of font, bottom line or differentiate somehow that these scores are womens and these are men’s so we aren’t blown away when we see UCONN beat Syracuse by 40 in bball only to realize “Oh, it’s women’s.”

-Continuing with the McGwire story, I would like to hear how many experts, former & current players and coaches think that McGwire could go out and hit a HR right now. Can he test clean right now? Could he hit 20 HRs in AAA since there were rumors of an MLB comeback.

-Viewers are becoming more and more desensitized to steroids revelations & admissions. I think viewers want to know less that they did it (since everyone now assumes everyone took them) and more of what they took. Which drugs, what classifications, how applied, what area of game it is designed to improve. Steroids are now mainstream enough that just the fact of someone taking them is not enough for the knowledge-hungry audiences of ESPN. They all did it we assume, so it’s old news, what they took is probably harder to find out but more what I want to know as both a casual sports fan and sports writer. Additionally, this is what people will go online to find out via blogs.

-Lastly, I wanted to comment on the audio during the show, particularly during the interviews. As a former radio producer I am programmed to hear the mistakes. During the interviews with John Clayton and Tim Kurkjian I heard anchors breathing, sniffing, clearing his throat and shuffling the hard copy of his scripts. I always made a habit when running audio for TV or Radio to bring down the anchors mic level a notch during an interview to prevent that unnecessary noise from coming across the broadcast."