Big-name journalists find new calling in academia

How does one find career satisfaction in an industry struggling to keep up with diminishing advertising and digital mayhem? For more veteran sports reporters, the answer to that question is the sanctuary of a college campus.

Mentoring, teaching and presiding over new sports media programs are all becoming common extracurricular activities — and, in some cases, full-time crossover careers.

Making the leap into academia can bring journalists an appreciated extra source of income, offer new challenges, and allow them to give back to the next generation of reporters and writers. For many, it puts them in touch with what’s relevant in a way that spending time around fellow middle-age reporters never could.

And, for some, the motivation hits close to home, as in what they should do next in a rapidly consolidating industry smitten with younger, cheaper writers and reporters.

“I believe this is when I should be giving back, and I wouldn’t be happy if I weren’t.” Christine Brennan USA Today / Northwestern University Photo by: GETTY IMAGES

“It’s no longer a job for life,” said former USA Today sports reporter Kelly Whiteside, now teaching full time at Montclair State University. “Because of the uncertainty, especially for people 40 and older, we’re sort of looking at the landscape” for career options.

The trend of moonlighting sports media types seems to keep growing, according to many who are taking the plunge, and the financial enticement of working in academia can play a part. Though salary figures for private universities are largely unavailable, publicly available numbers from state schools show full-time teaching gigs paying $70,000 and positions with more authority paying more than $100,000. Part-time and adjunct jobs pay less but also demand less time.

There’s nothing new about professionals taking assignments in the classroom, but the new trend is bringing national brand-name sports journalists into more programs and to a greater depth.

Last year, Christine Brennan and Michael Wilbon, former classmates at Northwestern University, became professors of practice as part of their alma mater’s sports journalism graduate program. Brennan is a columnist for USA Today, and Wilbon co-hosts “Pardon the Interruption” on ESPN.

Brennan and Wilbon aren’t paid for their work for Northwestern. Both are also members of the university board of trustees. They don’t teach formal classes or grade papers, but instead speak to students, lend advice on projects and jobs, and participate in other events connected with the school.

Much of her role involves meeting with and talking to students and encouraging them, Brennan said.

“What I say is, ‘I want to tell you where I was when I was your age,’” she said. “‘I had doubts, I had fears, I had worries.’”

She has long counseled students and young journalists through emails and phone calls and by delivering guest lectures. “I believe this is when I should be giving back, and I wouldn’t be happy if I weren’t,” Brennan said.

Andrea Kremer (left) talks to ESPN’s Hilary Guy and HBO’s Jordan Kronick at Boston University. Photo by: COURTESY OF ANDREA KREMER

On April 15, Andrea Kremer of NFL Network and HBO’s “Real Sports” will host “Play It Forward,” a summit at Boston University featuring owners and executives from the Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins and Patriots as well as reporters, medical experts and others discussing the future of sports. The summit is a new event created by Kremer as part of her expanded role at BU. She recently became an Andrew R. Lack Fellow, a professorship funded through a donation by Lack, who runs NBC News.

Before she went to London in 2012 to cover Olympic swimming for NBC, Kremer accepted an invitation to speak to a group of BU students headed to the Games to get hands-on experience filing stories for the local NPR affiliate and other outlets.

Her guest lecture went so well that the professor, Susan Walker, who runs the BU College of Communication graduate program, asked Kremer to consider becoming an adjunct professor. A year later, Kremer introduced her class on interviewing, mostly made up of grad students.

“I always wondered: Who teaches interviewing?” Kremer said. “I’ve done thousands of interviews, I’ve got experience. To students, it’s a big deal” to learn from someone still in the industry.

At the University of Alabama, former Sports Illustrated staffer Lars Anderson, now a senior writer at Bleacher Report, became a full-time faculty member after four years as a part-time professor. He, too, got started after a one-off appearance, first riffing on the lost art of listening during a guest lecture at Alabama and then accepting an offer to become an adjunct professor.

Anderson, like Michelle Kaufman, a Miami Herald sportswriter and part-time professor of sports journalism at the University of Miami, emphasizes hands-on experience in his classes. Anderson and Kaufman assign game stories, features and profiles and act as de facto editors. In Anderson’s class, students meet and discuss one another’s prep work for stories: Who else should the writer interview? What should they lead with? What’s it about? What will bring it to life?

Kaufman is a Miami alum who started teaching there 12 years ago. “They called and said they were interested in a sports journalism course,” she said. “I started from scratch. I had never taught anything. But it sounded interesting.”

Kaufman’s course, usually limited to 16 students, includes covering one Heat and one Marlins game, a day of Dolphins rookie camp and other outings. Throughout the semester, students have campus beats, including men’s or women’s basketball and other Hurricanes teams.

The school has broached the idea of having Kaufman help start and run a broader sports media program, but she worries that leaving her reporting job would make her less effective as a professor.

Many new to teaching mentioned class structure, lectures and building a syllabus as daunting new challenges. Often they lean on one another for help with learning the academic game: Sharing syllabuses, swapping subject ideas and making guest appearances on other campuses are commonplace.

Kevin Blackistone, a Washington Post columnist and panelist on ESPN’s “Around the Horn,” began teaching journalism at the University of Maryland in 2008. Blackistone recalls spending a lot of time in the school’s Center for Teaching Excellence, which provided advice and examples on lectures, creating a syllabus and other classroom tips.

For some, academia has replaced sports reporting entirely.

Whiteside and Vicki Michaelis, also formerly of USA Today, moved into full-time college careers in the past few years.

The University of Georgia recruited Michaelis, who taught sports journalism at the University of Colorado as an adjunct professor while she was a reporter, to start a sports media program. She describes the startup as entrepreneurialism with a safety net and credits the experience with forcing her to learn all manner of new skills, particularly with technology.

Whiteside teaches at Montclair State, a two-block walk from her New Jersey home. She has a young daughter, and switching careers afforded her much more time at home. During her reporting days, Whiteside was a part-time professor at her alma maters, Rutgers and Columbia.

Michaelis points to digital media, specialized sports TV networks and in-house team media as possible landing spots for her students as well as whatever version of traditional media emerges.

“Newspapers are dying, we can’t deny that, and local TV stations aren’t far off,” Michaelis said. “But there are so many things you can still do. … Journalism schools have realized sports is the honey that draws the bees. We want people to come in those doors.”

Erik Spanberg writes for the Charlotte Business Journal, an affiliated publication. Research director David Broughton contributed to this report.