From her days reporting on ESPN to teaching the next generation of reporters, Jane McManus has witnessed how both the sports industry and journalism’s role in world have evolved first-hand.
In the latest episode of Cogcast, Jane shares her career journey within sports with Account Director – and former student – Vanja Lakic, from her early days covering The Jets, the social media’s democratization of information, and her upcoming book on how women’s sports are finally getting their due.
Jane also shares, as a veteran sports journalist, unique angles on covering the upcoming Paris Olympics and how AI could have been used in the lead-up to the global event.
Transcript for podcast
Vanja Lakic 0:05
Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of Cogcast Cognito’s podcast where we speak with journalists and media pros about the latest happenings in the media world. I’m Vanja Lakic, your host today we have Jane McManus as our special guest. Jane was an adjunct professor at the Columbia Journalism School including a dear sports reporting professor of mine. Jane spent about eight years at ESPN covering sports and she helped found DSP and W that’s dedicated to the coverage of women’s sports. She was an ESPN radio host, and a sports columnist at outlets including the New York Daily News and Deadspin. Jane was also communications director at Marist College and Seton Hall.
She continues to write sports columns and will be coming out with a new book in February that explores the business of financing women’s sports, ahead of the Summer Olympics that start July 26.
We’ll be speaking with Jane about the stories that businesses should pitch to reporters. We’ll also talk to her about how journalism has changed since the days when she started out as a reporter, her relationship with social media, as someone with 1000s of followers on Twitter X, and how that’s helped her land a book deal.
Jane, a big welcome. Thank you so much for joining us.
Jane McManus 1:32
Vanya. It was such a delight for you to ask me considering our history. I really appreciate that invitation.
Vanja Lakic 1:39
The pleasure is ours. Thank you so much, we’re so lucky to have you. Can we start off with the beginning of your journalism days and how things changed back then from what you’re seeing now?
Jane McManus 1:52
Oh my gosh, the beginning of my journalism days … it was radically different, just in terms of deadlines, in terms of the way that you communicated. The timing of your communication, the lack of social media, it was very much “hours of operation.”
Now all the hours are hours of operation, you have a 24-hour news cycle. The interactions with players were different, expectations of you were different, it was more writing, you might be called to do a radio show every once in a while, but the information distribution was different.
So, you were thinking differently about the pieces of information you were taking in, and then how were redistributing them. And I think that cognitive difference in how you go about doing your day … you had time to focus, you had time to try to conceive of how ideas were, what you thought about stories, give them a little time to marinate. But now it’s immediate, you have to be able to take whatever information you take in and immediately figure out how you’re going to distribute it. I think sometimes it’s a little more hit and miss now with how stories come out, maybe not as fully formed. But you have to get that information out, because you’re constantly competing, and that has changed things.
Vanja Lakic 3:00
Which changes, do you think, have improved journalism and which do you think have maybe eroded the profession?
Jane McManus 3:07
I think, as a sports journalist, primarily, being able to hear from athletes and being able to have athletes have their own platforms is very important and, arguably, it makes us less important, I would say. But, at the same time, I think the democratization of communication, being able to hear from fans, having fans’ voices is important as well. I started covering the Jets in 2008 and being able to have fans reach out to me on Twitter and in getting to know who they were … I ended up meeting those fans at a training camp and having that back and forth, ‘hey, what’s happening with the backup guard’ and then being able to go find that information out and to do a story on it, find out what people are curious about what’s important, I enjoyed doing that. I mean, it’s not necessarily, you don’t want to be 100% audience service – you need to also be looking for other stories – but it’s a great way to cultivate an audience. I think that dialogue is great. And I would say that’s probably the biggest thing, that now we can all speak to each other, as opposed to having it being one way information distribution.
Vanja Lakic 4:13
Of course, things have changed a lot in journalism, as you point out, and you were an adjunct professor at Columbia, so I’m curious to hear from you how important is a journalism education in this day and age, when we have misinformation and AI? We work with journalists all the time. And at least I would say the majority of them have at least some kind of formal education in journalism, and few of them don’t. So, I’m kind of curious to hear from you what you think, how important is it to have gone to journalism school?
Jane McManus 4:48
This may be a bit self-serving, but I think it’s more important than ever. And there are a couple of reasons for that. There’s a trend certainly toward, let’s say, in the 1990s and early aughts, there was a trend of corporations, corporate media to hire more kind of ivy league academic type of reporters. But that’s not, I think, why it’s important. I actually think why it’s important is that there’s less room for error, when you’re actually starting out as a reporter now, you need to come in with a wider skill set. You’re not going to necessarily get the mentoring from the grizzled old FET on the desk, like I did. I remember starting to work at the New York Daily News in 1998, and there were all guys on the sports desk, you know, a couple of them had flasks of liquor in their desks they’d pull them out after midnight when the paper went to bed, and they’d pull you aside and they’d say ‘you need to know about this, or you should ask this question, or you should be reading for this.’ It was a bit of an education, it was fun, a lot of storytelling. It was exciting to be in New York City and to have that, I don’t think there’s as much of that now.
Also, you’re more isolated [as] young people coming into a newsroom. Now, it’s going to be a virtual newsroom, for the most part. So, you don’t even have that personal communication, necessarily, with a colleague next to you who can say … you could reach over to and then when you’re on deadline and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this idea.’ I mean, you can certainly do that virtually, but having somebody right next to you doing it … it still happens in the press box, but you have to think that most people aren’t impressed. Boxes now write their stories at home. So being able to get that sense of, develop it, hone it … that institutional knowledge that comes from working in a collaborative setting. You’re more working as an individual. And that’s why getting a journalism degree can be helpful in a way that it may not have been when I was coming up, because you need to really be able to do more things, and do more things right away. It’s a tightrope, whenever you’re performing publicly. If you fall off that wire you’re doing it in front of everyone. So, you know, in some ways, I think that’s more important now.
Vanja Lakic 6:59
And you talked a little bit about your early days as a reporter, and throughout the years, and I’m really curious, how was that? You’re a veteran sports reporter, you’ve had some incredible access to the top athletes and the most defining sports moments. How was that for you? And how was your interaction with PR people?
Jane McManus 7:21
Well, I mean, I think being a sportswriter is an incredible job. And that’s why so many young people coming are coming into journalism programs now, because they want to pursue it, they see how fun it is, they see … the fun on screen. You being there, you’re witnessing, firsthand, things that people are watching on their television sets. So, there’s that, it’s a very romanticized profession, and I think that is something that I loved and would do all over again.
People used to send pitches, but you wouldn’t necessarily get them in your inbox, you would get them because you were sitting down next to somebody. And now those personal relationships aren’t there in the same way necessarily. I’ve always appreciated the back and forth with PR people, not that I always followed up on the storytelling, but you know, there’s the negotiation of someone who has access to a player, or to a mother, to somebody who’s doing something interesting, a doctor, somebody in the field. I get a lot of pitches that, certainly when I was, when I was a beat writer, I would get a lot of pitches from medical groups saying we have a doctor who knows a lot about ACLs. And I would get those land in my inbox right after somebody tore their ACL, and that’s not unhelpful. Even if I don’t use that necessarily in the story, being able to call somebody and say, ‘hey did you see that play, what do you think of that, what kind of pitfalls should I avoid?’ That’s how you develop a relationship and you’re able to use that going forward, I find that helpful.
So the best ways are either the personal relationship where you’re running into somebody at a tournament, at a game during the course of a season, but then also the well-timed expert who might be useful, and again, not expecting us as early to have that person, their name being lights on the first time that we interact. But, again, developing that relationship and that back and forth as somebody that I know I can trust, and who has information on that particular area.
Vanja Lakic 9:20
Something that you said at coffee before is how you describe yourself more as a gadfly than a cheerleader, and I think that’s such an important and interesting difference, I suppose between PR people and journalists. And at their core, I think journalists are more gadflies. So how would you, knowing that, what are some best practices to maybe interact with journalists for PR people?
Jane McManus 9:49
I love your question. I think that’s such an important point. We do different things. And I there are a lot of teams who wanted me to be a PR person or an extension of PR staff. And that’s something I’m not comfortable with, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a lot of areas of agreement.
We were speaking briefly before the podcast on how you can reach people, and as social scientists have found, the best way to reach people is to have a point of agreement, and then to work from within that space, and kind of pull those circles out. So, I feel like, between journalists and PR people, we realize we don’t fulfill the same roles. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t agreement and there aren’t places where we can work together in a way that’s mutually beneficial for me.
I don’t want ever to have my story dictated to me, that will never be something that that works necessarily. I think PR people can certainly … there are lots of ways for you to get your message out more directly than a journalist. But at the same time, you know, there’s, like I said, access to a public figure, or even just having a conversation about something I am not beyond having my mind changed [on], and neither are other people that have had conversations with, and I think it’s important for me to realize that I could be overlooking something.
And the other thing is, I often go to PR people to verify information, because I don’t want to get it wrong. So, if I have an idea in my head, for example, as a leader, as a columnist, I would do this quite frequently. I may have established relationships with people who don’t see things the same way that I do, but I might call that person up to give me the oppositional case to the one that I’m making in a column. Because I want to have that information, I would like to know where I might be missing something or a blind spot. And I think that’s, again, when you’re looking at it from the point of view of a relationship, as opposed to a one-off, then those are conversations that can happen, and can often be really beneficial to both parties.
Vanja Lakic 11:44
And you were also on the other side, or what maybe journalists say is the dark side, and that is in communications. In academia, Executive Director and communications director and Marist Seton Hall. So curious how that was for you as a reporter.
Jane McManus 12:00
Sure, for both of those jobs, I had columnist roles as well. So, I was working as a columnist for the New York Daily News, where I got my start after college on the web desk called Most new york.com back in 1998, a million years ago, in internet years. And also at Deadspin, then later on. So, I kind of think, and this is probably something that a lot of people can relate to work in media now, you wear different hats. And if I’m wearing my calmness hat, that’s different than when I’m wearing my academic hat. I mean, I don’t think they’re so fundamentally different that I have a personality schism, or I’m not able to put those two things together, but I might say something in the course of being a journalist, that in the course of representing an academic institution, wouldn’t be appropriate.
So, you have to realize that the boundaries of what you talk about are different in each role, and to be able to manage those things. I think it would be the same as if someone was, let’s say, freelance, doing freelance PR for an organization, but then also writing news stories – and there are people who do that, because now [there] are freelance roles, there are a lot of people who do freelance and you’re taking paying roles where you can find them. And so, I think we all kind of have to realize, what are the rules of the court that I’m currently playing on?
Vanja Lakic 13:17
Yeah. That’s very true in today’s journalism world, where you’ll find reporters are maybe freelancing and writing for publications, but they’re also writing content on another side. So, moving on to social media, because you have so many social media followers on Twitter about 37,000 or so.
Jane McManus 13:38
ESPN helps, covering the NFL helps…
Vanja Lakic 13:44
That’s the question, how did you build that? How important is it for journalists to build their own social media profiles these days when the media industry is so uncertain, and you might need to rely on that social following for other jobs, potentially, and with Twitter changing rapidly in the last few years, and Elon Musk taking over? What’s your thoughts on the continued building of social media profiles?
Jane McManus 14:12
Well, I think having a social media presence is absolutely crucial because you’re reporting in a lot of different ways now. And being able to use that as a place to distribute information – again, depending on what your role is, and what your job is, and what your employer thinks – it’s still, certainly was, early on, very useful. As I said, it was the first place early on in 2008 when I joined Twitter, it was the first place where I was hearing from fans, not just like cheering in the in the stands, but asking specific questions, about specific players or team dynamics, or coaches, or ‘why was this play called then’ and being able to follow up on that.
I think my follower group, I had 1,000 followers when I got to ESPN, in 2010/2009, I kind of feel like that’s my that’s my real group. Like that’s the core, that’s the core group of followers that I had. And then being on TV brings a lot of followers as well, people are curious about you, they want to know what you have to say. If you break news on TV, people are like, ‘oh, here’s a place I can go to break news.’ I think, adding context, what I always felt was important was, if you would see something, let’s say you’re a player who comes into their first game, or a wide receiver makes his first catch, and say I talked to that player the week before, being able to have the context from something that he said, [for example] this player said this about the quarterback, that player said that he was going to look for this other player when he started his first game, like those kinds of things that added context. Or he caught that catch – he had his weight on the foot that he broke last year, this coming back from that injury, you know, whatever it is, adding that context, I think is super helpful for a sportswriter and helps me develop and grow an audience.
I think also … a lot of that audience came around when Ray Rice, that incident happened in the NFL – He punched his then girlfriend, his now wife, a lot has happened since then, but it was really kind of a bellwether for the NFL in a lot of different ways. And I was able to do a lot of original reporting in that area. And I also did make a lot of phone calls, not just within the NFL, but outside of the NFL, to domestic violence groups, to people who had worked in that area for a long time, about what are the dynamics here, what are the pitfalls, what are some of the mistakes that the media usually makes when talking about this issue? And having, doing that, really early on, and without being told by any of my editors to do it, put me in a place where I could then report a lot of that news in a context that made people feel pretty comfortable. Because I wasn’t trying to take a stand, but I had the context that a lot of other reporters at that time, certainly early on, didn’t.
And so I think having the context is another way to build a social media following. I don’t think a lot of people make the mistake now, if I say something outrageous, and counter-positional to prevailing wisdom, that’s a way to, and that’ll certainly get, people coming to you or paying attention to you. But again, it’s, are you looking at a moment, are you looking at a career, and I think when you’re building a career, and when you want to be a professional for a long time, that you have to guard the instinct to make the moment against what it would cost you down the line, if you happen to be wrong, or inflammatory or unfair?
Vanja Lakic 17:23
That’s really important for our clients, as well. We advise them to take counterintuitive opinions to get quoted and that sometimes is the right advice. But I love what you said about, are you taking advantage of a moment, or are you building a credible career.
Jane McManus 17:46
A lot of times, that position, that somebody hasn’t thought of, is actually really important for a journalist to have. So for your client base, that probably is a really smart way to say like, ‘hey, get somebody that piece of information or that angle that they hadn’t really thought of.’ I think that’s really important, to be able to provide that and to be able to come to somebody with that. And given that, in the moment, without being inflammatory … that’s not going to be inflammatory from somebody who sits in the context and understands the issues. It’s when you come to it, just to say it, because you know it’s going to be provocative, I think that that’s … it could be the same thing, almost, but it would be, you either have the wherewithal to back it up, or you don’t.
Vanja Lakic 18:27
Let’s talk about your book. You’re writing a book and it is due to come out next year. So
Jane McManus 18:34
February It’s a never-ending runway leading up to my book launch.
Vanja Lakic 18:40
I’m very excited, because you’ve been reporting on women’s sports for a long time. Tell us more about that.
Jane McManus 18:46
I think this is actually really exciting, and maybe it would be interesting for your clients as well, because it’s the area around the economic space around women’s sports. And we’re having a moment now. I pitched this book back in 2020, that was when I first put together a proposal for it because I felt at the time, that that there were a lot of reasons women’s sports hadn’t taken off to that point, and that things were changing. But there was a real palpable sense in 2020, to me, that things are really changing. The NWSL and the WNBA, were two of the first sports to come back during the COVID shortened years, and the ratings were great, really good, solid, and it’s because they were visible.
The NWSL was on CBS. There wasn’t a lot of competition in the sports landscape. But it shows and, of course, up to that point, there have been a lot happening with US Women’s National Team, and, you know, the Equal Pay discussion was full throated at that moment.
But I felt there had been a lot of institutional reluctance to broadcast women’s sports to give them the platform that they deserved. And I’ve been at ESPN W when it launched in 2010, so I’d seen firsthand from within a major American media organization … how that reluctance played out and ended up, I think, clipping the wings a times when women’s sports we’re really ready to have a transformational moment. And here we are at the moment, so it’s great.
I’ve done a lot of storytelling around some of that reluctance, but then also around why now, and one of the reasons I think ‘why now’ is that you have places like Sports Innovation Lab, which just look to quantify what’s total addressable market? That just wasn’t a number that was out there, what’s the ceiling for women’s sport? People didn’t know. Men are really comfortable with men’s sports, and they felt that elevating women’s sports would disrupt the men’s market. [But} I think we’re finding that that’s not happening right now.
There are certainly I think people who feel alienated by the elevation of women’s sports, you don’t have to look hard to find that, but the idea that it’s going to then negatively impact the interest or momentum of sports, that’s just not bearing out.
So that’s what my book’s about, it’s about the women who’ve worked behind the scenes for decades, many of them who still aren’t at ESPN now to see this moment happening. It’s very exciting to me, and it’s exciting to see everything that’s happening. And I think people are starting to realize, and advertisers are starting to realize, that women’s sports are a vehicle to be used for advertising very effectively. And in some ways even more effectively the men’s sports because of the way you’re reaching audiences. Again, the point of agreement in women’s sports is that women should be playing sports, and that’s a very powerful place to reach a lot of consumers. So, a very effective vehicle for advertising right now.
Vanja Lakic 21:37
Yeah, absolutely. And I loved your LinkedIn posts where you said about leaving money on the table by not taking advantage of the power of women’s sports, and what that can do for business and advertising.
Jane McManus 21:52
And I think there are a lot of people who’ve been in decision making roles who are comfortable leaving money on the table, if it means they’re not elevating ideas they’re uncomfortable with.
Vanja Lakic 22:01
Well, my last question here is the Summer Olympics that’s coming up in a week now.
Jane McManus 22:08
Again, the never-ending lead up to the Summer Olympics, it’s felt like a million years since we’ve found out about Paris and planning for Paris and barges for the opening ceremonies for Paris and all of this.
Vanja Lakic 22:21
It’s finally here, just a week away and what we’re doing with our clients right now is thinking about how to pitch stories that relate to AI and tech and business and the Olympics. And I’m wondering from you, whether you have any ideas of like what that looks like, or what angles would interest reporters and publications right now, as you know, they’re getting a lot of pitches about the Olympics.
Jane McManus 22:47
So, I was in Paris for three weeks this summer, and went to AFP, went to Euro sports and went to L’Equipe. So I heard firsthand about how some of those media organizations are planning for the Olympics and planning their coverage around the Olympics. And boy, are they having a lot of reporters on site, I was really astounded by it.
I think there are a lot of questions about security; reaching reporters, when it comes with experts on security, and on analysis around that would be a really effective way. Certainly I heard from a number of people while there that the very idea of opening ceremonies, while very exciting and innovative, is also a bit of a nightmare when it comes to security risks and securing that whole area – and even the way that buildings will be secured along the path that overlooks the Seine, as the barges with the athletes make their procession. So that sort of thing would be interesting.
I was also in the metro going to … the stop closest to the Eiffel Tower and you could barely get out and get in – and this was back in the beginning of June. So I’m very curious how they’re going to, how they’re going to get efficiently get spectators in and out of these different venues, considering that the main way that they’re going to be able to get around is using the Paris Metro.
So transportation related things, audience experience related things would be I think, very interesting to reporters, particularly reporters who are based in France, like pitching the AFP or L’Equipe, those stories are going to get international pick up, they’re going to be translated, and they’re going to be sent everywhere. So I would say that is super important.
The AI angle to me is super interesting, you probably know a lot more about this than I, but in terms of predictive modeling, I would be really curious if Paris would use any kind of predictive modeling in terms of people moving, figuring out where and when people are going to be moving and how to transport them. The thing is, the Metro comes, in Paris, every three minutes. You can’t add more trains. You could certainly add more trains to the York City subway system, because you can sometimes stand there a long time and wait for a train, but in Paris is quite efficient. So, I’d be really curious if they’d looked at different ways of modeling, when surges would be happening and how to move people at that area. So yeah, those are just some of the things that come to the top of my head.
There’s a lot a lot of storytelling, obviously, around athletes, as always, I think a lot of storytelling, perhaps around athletes and gender … you can look back at the 1924 Olympics in Paris where there weren’t women, that was the Olympics before women started competing. So there’s, you know, there are a lot of different ways to kind of break down and look at what’s happening this year and pitch different stories around that.
Vanja Lakic 25:43
That is very helpful as we consider different angles. I like the security angle, we’re very focused on how data and AI is impacting the Olympics and what that means for athlete performance. Security, as you said, so, there’s going to be a lot of coverage, of course, so I really appreciate your thoughts on where we can break through.
Jane McManus 26:05
The eyes of the entire world are going to be on Paris for the Olympics and the Paralympics, as well. So, I think it’s important to keep the storytelling coming. Also, when the Olympics leave town, but the Paralympics start, hopefully you will actually see some of the tweaks that can be implemented from, not mistakes necessarily, but issues that arise for the Olympics that can then be corrected during the Paralympics, or things that can be augmented. So, I think that there’s a lot of storytelling to be done there as well.
Vanja Lakic 26:40
On that note, thank you so much for joining us today. This was really, interesting, and we’re very lucky to have you on any time.