A Q&A with Emma Span of Sports Illustrated on the future of the magazine, editing Tom Verducci and appearing on Jeopardy!

On By jed012788

Every week we will run a Q&A with a wonderful reporter to talk about what’s right and wrong with journalism, their interests and random other stuff. Some are friends. Some are just people whose work we really respect. Some cover sports. Some don’t. Hopefully all will be interesting.

This week, it’s with Emma Span, a senior baseball editor at Sports Illustrated. Emma took a particularly circuitous route in her career before eventually landing in sports journalism, where she quickly climbed the ranks to one of the most coveted positions in the industry. Here, we discuss her strange path, the future of Sports Illustrated and what it’s like to edit a legend like Tom Verducci.

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1. We start all our Q&As in the same way—at the beginning. So: How did you break into journalism, and what led you to where you are now?

It was not exactly a direct route. I started right after college as an assistant at a talent agency, but I absolutely hated it (and also was bad at it). So I quit and got a job as a bookseller at Barnes & Noble. Then I got hired as a copywriter summarizing Z-grade DVDs for a company that sold those descriptions to online retailers—it was everything from Christian kids’ movies to German karaoke to anime porn. You can actually still find some of the descriptions I wrote for titles like “Stanley the Stinkbug Goes to Camp” and “Titaboobs Paradise” and “The Gingerdead Man” (which stars Gary Busey as a serial killer who gets reincarnated as an evil gingerbread man) on eBay or other sites. Anyway, I was bored out of my mind at that job, so in 2006 I started a baseball blog, really just to entertain myself. Based on that, the then-new editor at the Village Voice asked me if I wanted to do a few articles covering the Mets and Yankees.

It was quite a learning curve, because although I knew a lot about baseball I had never covered a single sporting event, and suddenly I was in the locker room at Shea Stadium, talking to Tom Glavine and trying not to throw up. I had very little idea of what I was doing, and I was basically paralyzed with anxiety. But I got a little less terrified as the weeks went on. The Voice hired me full time to cover sports… but less than a year later my editor got fired, and almost everyone he had hired got fired, including me. By then I had gotten an agent and written a proposal and I had a book deal, but not one that paid enough to live on, so I was working on that and freelancing and working a bunch of different day jobs to pay the bills—I sold mittens shaped like bear paws at the Union Square holiday market (shoutout to BearHands & Buddies), I ghostwrote dean’s letters for a Caribbean medical school, I temped for a Wall Street recruiting firm, I worked at a wine store in Murray Hill. I know I’m forgetting a few in there. Finally, after the book came out, I got a job as an associate editor on the night shift at The Daily, which was an iPad-only publication that also no longer exists. That was my first editing job, and I owe it to Chris D’Amico, the sports editor there who gave me a shot, and who died last year, way too young. The Daily sports staff got laid off about a year and a half after I started, shortly before the whole publication went under. But right after that I got hired as an editor at Sports on Earth, which was just getting ready to launch. And that turned out to be an amazing opportunity where I really got to shape our coverage and work with fantastic writers and a great editor in chief in Larry Burke. And in 2014 Chris Stone reached out to me about an open editing position at SI. So here I am. Exactly as planned.

2. Typically our guests here at The -30- are reporters, a job we know quite a bit about from our own experience. You, however, are not a reporter. You’re an editor — at Sports Illustrated no less! This is a job we know about mostly from working for our bosses. To people unfamiliar with journalism, the path to an editor seems clear: You pay your dues as a reporter and rise into a management role. That’s how it works in most industries. But as we all know, great reporters don’t necessarily make great editors, and vice versa. How important or necessary do you think reporting experience is for an editor? What do you makes a good editor? What advice would you give to writers who might fashion themselves as management material one day? 

Because there’s no other well-defined path to becoming an editor, people do tend to give you the chance based on the assumption that someone who’s a good writer can also be a good editor, and as you say, that’s not necessarily true. It’s a significantly different skill set. But I do think writing/reporting experience is important, so you can understand what your writers are dealing with and have a realistic sense of what will go into a given story and offer some guidance on it and just generally empathize. But I’ve learned so much about reporting and structuring stories since I became an editor; there are many pieces I wrote back in the day that I’d love to get a redo on.

My career path was so weird and roundabout that I always feel a little odd trying to give people advice or guidance on their own careers—you probably shouldn’t do what I did! Things more or less worked out, but I also had a lot of luck and a lot of opportunities and a lot of breaks along the way, and not everyone gets those things. My hope is that eventually, instead of just giving advice, I can be that break for other people.

3. Sports Illustrated consistently produces some of the country’s best sportswriting, but a lot has changed in the magazine world: Parent company Time Inc. has been sold to Meredith. The magazine’s print schedule has shrunk. The news cycle has sped up to the point where daily newspapers are struggling to stay current, let alone weekly magazines. Given that, what do you see as the role of Sports Illustrated in the modern media landscape? What advantages does your publishing schedule give you?

There’s a lot of uncertainty about what will happen when Meredith takes over. And a lot of the changes over the last few years—primarily, of course, the budget cuts and layoffs—have been really rough. SI has lost so many talented people. The new schedule, though, is actually one change that I don’t object to. The news cycle is so fast now that you can’t keep up with it as a weekly publication anyway, and we had already been trying to move away from game stories and event coverage, because that’s not what readers need from us now. I think doing fewer, longer issues could allow us to really set our own agenda and focus on the kind of deeper stories that SI does well (and that we tend to enjoy the most). In theory, at least, I think it might not be a bad thing.

4. As a senior editor for SI’s baseball coverage you are on the team responsible for editing Tom Verducci, one of the most respected baseball writers of this or any other generation. What is it like editing somebody like Tom, compared to editing a story written by, say, a younger, less experienced or well-known writer? How if it at all do you treat his copy differently?  

I do edit Tom, and he is… not normal. Basically you can say to him, “Hey, can you get on a plane and talk to X player and get me 3,000 words by Friday?” and the answer is generally yes, and the story is always good, and there is zero drama around any of it, ever. The first time I edited him, right after I started at SI, I was a little nervous, and I sent him probably a 600-word email explaining every change I had made to his story and why, and asking if there was anything he’d like to change or discuss. And he wrote back promptly, and the entirety of his email was two letters: “OK.” He wasn’t upset or trying to be terse or anything; it really just meant he was, in fact, OK with the edits. Tom doesn’t waste a lot of time. His copy comes in very clean, so edits are usually pretty light. He does tend to file long, so it’s not unusual to have to cut a few hundred (or even, once in a while, a couple thousand) words from his story to fit it in the magazine. Even then, he knows the drill and I think the most he’s ever protested is to mildly request that one or two sentences be restored.

During the 2015 World Series, Tom was calling every game for Fox in the booth, and the clinching game ended way past midnight on Sunday. The magazine goes to print on Mondays. By 7 a.m., there were 3,000+ clean, deeply reported words in my inbox. I still have no idea how he did that, but no one in the office had any doubt that he would pull it off. During October I think he just doesn’t sleep, and last winter he wrote a very good book in something like two months. I can’t say with any certainty that he isn’t a cyborg. (On the off chance he reads this, I hope it’s clear that I’m comparing him to a cyborg in the most positive sense possible.)

5. Writers don’t always agree with their editor. Sometimes, writers might even confront an editor to complain about their, let’s say, differing creative visions for a story. How do you handle that situation as an editor? How do you balance your journalistic instincts with the reality that in addition to a journalist, you are also a manager of people?

Heh. I hope this doesn’t sound like a cop-out, but it really depends on what kind of disagreement it is. If it’s something relatively minor like a word choice, or whether a certain quote or detail needs to be in there, then I’m more likely to give it to the writer if they feel strongly about it—in the end, it’s their name on the piece, not mine, so it’s important that they’re OK with it. If a disagreement is about clarity or accuracy, it’s obviously more important; and it’s also my job to occasionally save writers from themselves and save the publication from potential embarrassment. So if it’s not a matter of stylistic preference, but something bigger and more substantive, then I owe it to all of us to be firm. But honestly, that’s been very rare at SI. Even the younger or less-experienced writers I work with are really smart, talented people, and it’s extremely unusual for there to be a really big problem that someone is truly unwilling to change. When a writer and I do disagree, we can almost always come to a compromise that works for both of us. (In the past I’ve worked with a few writers for whom that was… less the case. That’s when it’s important to have a boss who’ll back you up, which I’ve generally been fortunate enough to have.)

6. You came to journalism on a somewhat circuitous path: You were a film studies major at Yale. Given that, it seems unlikely that baseball writing was your first dream. What were your aspirations that led you to study film? What caused you to shift over to journalism? How if at all has your film background come in handy in your journalism career?

As you can probably figure out from my answer to the first question, you are correct. I grew up a huge baseball fan (in New Jersey, rooting for the Yankees) and I always wanted to be a writer, but it honestly never occurred to me to be a sports writer. I’m not sure why not. I was always pretty much a nerd, so maybe it just seemed too jock-ish to be an option for me back them. Growing up I wanted to write fiction and then, as I got older and became a big movie geek, screenplays. That’s why I was a film major, and why I started working at a talent agency after college. Obviously things went a little differently. But I would say that storytelling is still storytelling, whether it’s a novel or a screenplay or a nonfiction piece about a pitcher. And I think what novels and movies and baseball all have in common is that you can lose yourself in them. That’s what’s so great about the baseball schedule, even though it’s brutal to cover it: Almost every day you get a new game, which is basically a new chapter in the story of the season. You can forget everything else for nine innings and immerse yourself in it.


7. What needs to be changed about baseball coverage and sportswriting?
There’s a lot of good baseball writing happening now—more than I have time to read. But though things in this area have improved a bit since I started, sportswriting in general and baseball writing in particular are still enormously white and enormously male, even though that doesn’t really reflect the fan base (or, when it comes to ethnicity, the players). Within that larger problem, I think baseball writing desperately needs more bilingual, Spanish-speaking writers. There are a number of great ones out there, for sure, but we still need more. (That includes SI— we now have several Spanish-speaking writers, where we used to have zero, but we still need to do better.) More than 30% of MLB players are Latino, including a lot of the best and most interesting and most exciting players in the league. While many speak English, a lot of Latino players are still, naturally, most comfortable in their first language. It’s definitely a step in the right direction that every MLB team is supposed to have a translator now, but if you’ve ever done interviews though a translator, you know that it’s just not quite the same: It’s harder to get a real conversation going, harder to capture a player’s voice. I think there are great stories in the game that aren’t getting told because of the language barrier.

8. You are a big baseball fan. At some point watching baseball was relaxation for you — a chance to unwind — but you’ve said before that even that is now work. That’s a common refrain for sportswriters — that obsession becomes occupation. Not that this is some kind of grueling put-upon, but do you miss watching baseball as a fan not as an editor? Your book, “90% of the Game is Half Mental” chronicled your love for the sport and the meaning it held for you. Where does the sport fit into your life now?

I do miss that aspect of it a bit, but I definitely will never complain about having to watch baseball as part of my job. When I first started I couldn’t really imagine not being a fan anymore, and I thought that sounded really sad… but it’s actually a pretty natural process, and I still love watching baseball, just in a different way than I used to. At this point I will watch whatever game seems most interesting or most important every night, and to the extent that I root for anything it’s generally based on what stories we have coming up—if we have a big Cody Bellinger article in the works, then I hope he plays well and, most of all, doesn’t get injured. (I can’t tell you how often injuries have derailed good stories in the last year or so.) If we’re working on something about the Nationals’ great pitching, of course I want the Nats to pitch well. But mostly I just root for interesting things to happen and for compelling characters and storylines to emerge, regardless of team. It’s not a bad way to watch games, even if it’s different and less emotional than the way I used to watch.

9. Sports Illustrated’s baseball preview edition is a mammoth output every year. How do you put that thing together? How early do you start working on it? Who talks to all those scouts and picks the pithiest quotes? What kind of feedback do you get from fans of the team you pick to win the World Series? (You know, considering the SI jinx and all.)

I start working on it right about… [checks watch]… now. Things won’t get truly crazy until spring training starts, because the reporting can’t really get underway before then, but we’re already starting to plan out the big stories and the covers and all that. It is huge, generally more than 70 edit pages, and it’s the hardest thing I do every year, though also one of the most enjoyable and engaging. The last few weeks before it closes, I just don’t schedule anything else because I know I’m going to be working on it pretty much every minute that I’m not sleeping or trying to keep my 1-year-old from playing with knives. We divide talking to the scouts between four or five of us—myself and the writers—and I always make time for that because I really love talking with scouts, especially when they have anonymity and can really get on a roll. The writers will send me 1,000-2,000 word transcripts for each team and I edit that down to about 350 or 400 words per team.
We do always hear from angry fans convinced that we jinxed their ballclub, but for the most part, it’s all in good fun… or at least, I try to take it that way. Every year I tell people: There’s no jinx, we’re just wrong a lot. But we haven’t decided who we’re picking to win the World Series this year yet, so for the record, it’s not too late to bribe me.


10. So you were a contestant on Jeopardy! I mean… that’s awesome. How did this happen? What was it like? What do we as the audience not see? Basically… tell us everything about this experience, particularly the “tricky buzzer timing.”

There’s an online test that anyone can sign up for, and if you get a certain score on that, you can go to a big in-person audition. I did it on a whim, because I loved watching Jeopardy!, because again, I am a nerd. It was fun, but it was also frustrating because I just could not get the buzzer timing right—I was either too early, which doesn’t count and freezes you out, or too late, so that the other contestants beat me to it—so there were a lot of questions I knew that I couldn’t properly buzz in for, including one where the answer was, “Who is Mickey Mantle?” which, as you can imagine, just killed me. I couldn’t believe that even on Jeopardy!, basically the dorkiest possible competition, my lack of hand-eye coordination was such a big factor. But in the end, it probably didn’t matter because I would never have gotten the Final Jeopardy answer in a million years —it was a tough one about the Queen Elizabeth II’s cruise ship, which is not exactly my area of expertise. I came in second and the guy who beat me, Terry from Plano, Texas, went on to the Tournament of Champions, so at least I lost to a formidable competitor.

There was a bit of a scandal about the guy who came in third, Jeff. It turned out that he had been on the show once before, years earlier, which isn’t supposed to be allowed, but somehow he had slipped through. Fans of the show figured it out when the episode aired and he was retroactively ruled ineligible. It turned out he was even wearing the exact same tie he’d worn earlier. So, even though I didn’t win, at least I got to indirectly be part of some Jeopardy! trivia.

 

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