In our never-ending quest to discuss real journalism in a world of fractured and disassembled media, Nestor invites longtime mentor and one-time colleague Mark Hyman, who heads the sports journalism program at the University of Maryland, to discuss the future of sports coverage for the next generation who aspire to carry the notebook and ask the tough questions for fans and citizens.
Nestor Aparicio and Mark Hyman discuss the evolution of sports journalism. Hyman, now a professor at the University of Maryland, reflects on his career and the changes in the industry. He highlights the increased opportunities for young journalists today, including social media, digital platforms, and diverse media outlets. Aparicio shares his experiences in journalism, emphasizing the importance of critical thinking, credibility, and the challenges of maintaining standards in an era of AI and social media. They also discuss the future of sports journalism, the role of team reporters, and the importance of objective reporting in a world where facts are often questioned.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Maryland crab cake tour, Baltimore Ravens, Philadelphia Eagles, sports media future, journalism evolution, social media impact, critical thinking, sports journalism, youth tackle football, community of color, basketball in Africa, NBA talent scouting, sports journalism education, sports media opportunities, sports journalism challenges
SPEAKERS
Nestor Aparicio, Mark Hyman
8
Nestor Aparicio 00:01
Welcome home. We are W, N, S, T am 1570 tasks of Baltimore and Baltimore. Positive, Happy Thanksgiving to everyone out there celebrating. I’m wearing my Cocos pub shirt because we’re going to be kicking off the Maryland crab cake tour next week for the holidays with spiked eggnog at Cocos will be over off the Morgan State campus. All of it brought to you by our friends at the Maryland lottery to have some Raven scratch offs to give away, as well as our friends at Jiffy Lube multi care, who have powered Luke back and forth to Owings Mills to cover all things Baltimore Ravens as they get ready for the Philadelphia Eagles in the running game at saquon Barkley through the holiday here, I’ve chased down a bunch of people. There have been some people in the music space. We’ve done a ton of music classic stuff at Baltimore positive. You can go check that out. But in the journalism space, this is a guy I tracked down a couple of months ago. We had a pretty special occasion of the 40th anniversary of the demise of my first newspaper. I was 16 when it went under, uh, actually 15 and 11 months at sports first and the Baltimore news American. This guy’s very special in my life. He’s gone on to do some incredible things, not just in the journalism space, but running things at the Shirley povidge Center, and I’ll get to his fancy schmancy title. But he’s important to me because my parents had the first ever byline I ever had at the news American to speak of journalism and how sacred it was to my father, and how my father loved newspapers, and all I ever wanted to be was a newspaper writer. Mark hyman’s byline is on the Tear Sheet of, I don’t know, page 10, D 10, or whatever it was, my first ever byline in the summer of 1984 Dick Gerardi names on that too. He’s very proud of that, I should say. But I think there was an Orioles sidebar that landed on the page where my first byline about Teresa Andrews in 1984 and winning a gold medal at the 84 Olympics. And I remember meeting you in the newsroom because I read your work. I was a huge Baltimore Orioles fan. Mark Hyman has gone on to do great things in journalism. He now educates young people. And first off, it’s great to see you. I’m sorry you weren’t a part of our little news American thing that we did an hour and a half of two months ago. But first things first, I met you a long time ago, and life has taken you in a different direction, huh?
Mark Hyman 02:18
40 years ago. Nestor, I mean, hard to believe I had a lot more hair when I met you. That that’s one thing that I’m
Nestor Aparicio 02:27
I got it all from you now. I have both of my hair.
Mark Hyman 02:30
8Well, I did. My ponytail. Days are well behind me. I can tell you that. Yeah, the the news American was, was an important couple of years in my life, you know, I arrived in the middle of the 1983 season to cover the Orioles. So you can imagine what those couple of months covering the Orioles in 83 were like. And, you know, ended up with a parade down Charles Street. So it’s pretty special,
Nestor Aparicio 02:55
yeah. I mean, I guess at that point in my life, I’m 1516, years old, all I ever wanted to do was work in a newspaper, right? So, I mean, I come at this honest. Give everyone your fancy title, Director and Professor of the Practice, Shirley Povich. I had met Shirley Povich many times in the oral press box as he came up from DC. And Shirley was a he at the University of Maryland, the Merrill college and, and I say this to you all the time, and you knew me as a kid. You’ve known me my whole life. You’ve known me since forever, right? All I ever wanted to do was be journalist, but I wouldn’t have been able to get into the Maryland School of Journalism in 1983 it’s for guys like you. And you know, it was a really, very, very competitive, very, very industry. We’re going to work at the post. We’re going to work at ESPN, do all of that, and especially on the sports side of things, where you are, it felt like, when I was the kid and you had the job, that the world was my oyster, and that there would be so many opportunities to be employed and do what I’ve done. And I’m now 56 which is 40 years of Baltimore sports journalism here that there’s been a lane for me to practice journalism for all of my lifetime.
Mark Hyman 04:06
So much has changed. I mean, when you and I were getting into the business and thinking about a career in sports journalism, there were really very few media outlets to break into the business. I mean, if you lived in Baltimore, you were either working for the Baltimore Sun or the news American or the evening sun, and there were a couple of other, you know, smaller publications that you might be working for, but the barriers to entry were very high at that time, and you really had to, you know, be totally committed to breaking into those few outlets that were available, you know, Nestor, you’re an example. You just work your butt off, and you are totally committed to the idea of of working at the news American, and you made it happen. But, but today, it’s so much different, because, you know, you have all of, you know, so many 1000s of. Of ways to break in. We have students who, you know, of course, have their own social media accounts on campus. They’re working for campus media. They’re working for the campus newspaper. They’re, you know, we have a digital platform that does play by play of 75 University of Maryland baseball games a year. We have, you know, video magazines, platforms that do pieces about Maryland sports. So, you know, my point is that there the barriers to entry, the opportunities to cover journalism are have just expanded dramatically since the days when we broke in.
Nestor Aparicio 05:38
Well, forever you there was, in my case, Bob Paston or Tom Gibbons or Jack Gibbons who was instrumental in my life, or any series of Bob nust arts and Molly Dunhams and editors who deemed me capable, credible, professional when I was a kid. I’ve gone back and read my my work back then to see, you know, how it appeared in the paper, and me going out with long hair then, and covering concerts late at night, and the work that I did, and even this crazy documentary came this year, like writing about triathlons and golf and just this wide variety. I loved hockey. I was the only person that knew hockey, but Jack Gibbons sent me to cover Dr J’s last basketball game, the bullets in the Sixers. I mean, a wide variety of different things you could cover. It feels very niche now. It feels like, Hey, I’m into whatever. MMA, I’m into whatever my lane is, baseball, minor league baseball, and finding a lane for all of that. But it felt to me like when you say barrier to entry, you were either in or out. I mean, you were either getting published. And that was the word they used when I was in college in the late 80s at UB and at Dundalk Community College. Was like, I walked in and my teacher said, You’ve been published. Like, that was a big thing. You know, everybody’s published now, for better or worse, right? But I would say there was a barrier to entry and there was credibility that came with the masthead for the Baltimore Sun or anything to say they have standards, you know? And I think standards are something that style guides out the window, headlines, flush, left down. What is journalism? What is breaking news? What is stolen, what is AI? Oh, my God. I mean, we just elected Trump again. Like people don’t facts in newspaper and where credibility and we’re creative or critical thinking is for what is a fact. We were just in a different time, and I don’t even know how to how I would teach it. I’ve had young people come to me and say, I want to be a student at Maryland for for Mark Hyman, where would the job placement be? Where? Where is the future of journalism? And I don’t have an answer for that. You’re way closer to the fire than I am, but it used to be a barrier to entry. And there used to be like degrees you had to have, and skills you had to have and and bosses and legal and spell check and just basic things that made you a journalist, as opposed to someone who wanted to be a journalist.
8Mark Hyman 08:12
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s an exciting time to become a sports journalist. You know, people talk about how the you know, it’s not a good time that you know traditional news organizations are in trouble or going out of business, all of which is true on the other hand, the the demand for sports news just keeps going up and up. I mean, it’s exploding, and the supply of sports news is expanding rapidly. So now that tells me that there’s kind of a healthy aspect of becoming involved in sports media these days. Now there are challenges. I mean, the business model for sports media has changed pretty dramatically since the days when you and I were working at the news American, it’s it’s more difficult to monetize sports coverage than it was in those days when you know the news American was selling classified ads and making money that way. That doesn’t happen anymore, but the opportunities to cover sports have expanded dramatically, and that’s we prepare kids to enter that you know, that marketplace with the skills that they need to succeed, and our kids are doing great. I can tell you more about that.
Nestor Aparicio 09:34
Well, I love that. I would just say nothing has changed my business, and I am the guy who sold every ad in the history of this radio station for 33 years, millions, 10s of millions of dollars of revenue that I’ve personally sold and been a part of and employing half of the competitor, 1057, and press box and all sorts of places here that I’ve been a job creator through all of this. And I used to sit in front of you. Literally, I don’t want to say 1000s, but more than 1000 I would say more than 100 more than dozens of hundreds of resumes for years and years and years to find people that could just write at a level that the Dundalk Eagle would publish in an era of spell check, in an era of now AI that’ll just correct your tone. If you wish to sound more like Shakespeare. You put that in and thou has cometh to the game is if you wish it to write it that way. I mean, AI has changed the playing field for all of that. I’m not going to go into my issues with the Orioles and the Ravens and where access journalism is but I would say, Mark nothing has changed my business more over 33 years of doing this as an independent am radio station, real journalism here with real standards and real breaking news. Who has an impeccable reputation for never breaking news that didn’t happen other than that, one April Fool’s joke we played, but other than that, but gambling and where the money is coming from and where the spigot will be for Draft Kings. That was just a little fantasy thing. They were just going to be fantasy kings, and they were going to play roto. Sure they were, they were, they were, they were coming in on gambling and what that means for the leagues to adjudicate that that’s a whole different level of that’s real sports journalism is saying how all that’s happening, but the money itself and the ballets this that become or the Sinclair boys buying the Baltimore Sun and saying, We’re the ball. Now you’re not really a journalism outfit. You’re a propaganda outfit. But more than that, you’re a gambling money outfit at Caesar’s and MGM and all those places that are going to be the places that are going to be employing your your young future journalists.
Mark Hyman 11:54
Well, well look, let’s bring this back to you know what journalism is all about. You know, objectivity and fairness and reporting and telling people, giving people information that is important to them, that they that they don’t know, but that they care about. We have students who are graduating from our program, and they’re doing that. I mean, the banner, Joseph Jonas Schaefer covering the Ravens Andy Kostka covering the Orioles Kyle goon, their columnist. All graduates of our program at the sun. We have several really young journalists who graduated from our program went right to the sun, Taylor Lyons, Tim deshiel, Jacob Steinberg. And then we have our alumni are pretty distinguished from, you know, Tim Kirchen, He’s a graduate of our program, Frank Isola, Monica McNutt, John Arand and Scott Van Pelt, who you I’m sure, are familiar with. So Bonnie,
Nestor Aparicio 12:55
8don’t forget. Bonnie. Bonnie Bernstein, okay,
Mark Hyman 13:00
so we had a young student who graduated in May. So he was sitting in the classroom in College Park in May, interned over the summer at the Washington Post. The end of the summer, the post hired him to cover the wizards. His name is Varun Shankar, and he is the wizards beat guy for The Washington Post, and this time last year, he was sitting in a classroom in College Park. So there are jobs traditional journalism, jobs at news organizations, and we’re preparing our kids to be candidates for those jobs. And the credentials that are required are very different than they were when you and I were breaking in. I mean, in those days, you needed a notebook and a pen, something to write with, and a typewriter. And if you had some curiosity and you were a good listener, you were employable. But now, as you know, Nestor, as well as anybody, you need to be able to communicate in front of a camera. You need to be able to edit video. If you have the skills required to podcast, that’s a credential set social media you know, every reporter, no matter what news organization they’re working for, needs to be able to leverage social media and to build a following and to develop a brand. So all of those credentials that now are are pretty basic and necessary. None of that was was even conceived of when we were breaking in. I
Nestor Aparicio 14:39
was scoffed at for all of that, I was made fun of and sort of thrown out of the industry, in regard to my nasty newsletter and taking pictures of places I was and having bubweiser up, and I was called a self promoter, you know, by the FM jocks and all of that stuff, because they worked for Hearst, they worked for the sun. They worked for times mirror, social media. Mean, you cover the team, you’re not supposed to be part of the story. Or tell Stephen A Smith that, who used to be my basketball reporter at Sporting News Radio. So you mentioned Scott Van Pelt, these larger than life personalities. They’re not journalists. I mean, neither was Chris Berman. Chris Berman was back, back, back, back, back. It was personality drove this 40 years ago, but it didn’t drive Ken Rosenthal or you, or the baseball beat writers, traditional people in that space, but modern journalism. To me, when I meet young people, you don’t want to know what I say to them, Mark, because I would if if my grandchild were 16 years old and came to me and said, pop, pop nest. Oh, man, Whoo, that’s weird. Yeah, my kid, um, would come to me and say, you know, what should I be? I’d say, work in STEM, work in cyber. Save the world. Don’t think you’re saving the world, because they’re not going to give you a press credential. They’re going to do what they did to me. They’re going to throw you out. And the real job to me for you in the journalism side, and this is where I see the world going is these team reporters that are, I don’t want to be mean, and I, you know, I like Ryan mink and I like the guys that work for the team, but they, I know too much. I’ve been at this a long time to know that John Harbaugh runs the building, and when you work for ravens.com you’re working for the lead. You’re not really a reporter. You’re just made to look like one. And I don’t mean to be disrespectful and say you’re Mean Gene Okerlund, or you’re, you know you’re but that’s really what a lot of this has become. And I feel like that even with the national broadcast where everybody is just kissing everybody’s left elbow to make everybody look good, because it’s really all under the NFL and MLB, and if they don’t want you around, and you’re talking to a guy who’s done this my whole life has been thrown out, that employment for the team would be what I would tell my 16 year old young person, that you’re not going to be a real journalist, but you’re going to be a team reporter, because that’s where the money and the jobs are. And I was kind of alarmed mark the not alarmed, but like I’ve watched Michelle Andres become a first employee at, you know, at the at the ravens, and they were going to have a little web page. And Chris pico was involved in that 20 years ago. And now I worked at Channel Two as an intern in the 90s with Scott Garceau, and I saw Mike gaffing, and they had a there were four or five people in the sports department at Channel Two. There were four or five people at Channel 11, on and on and on and on. It feels to me like these teams, especially teams with a lot of money and a lot of social media. And I had Ross Greenberg on two weeks ago talk about the difference between reality TV and whatever they’re filming, which is really corporate communication, brand development. Inside of all of these teams, it’s an army of jobs. I mean, it’s an unbelievable amount of of of equity all of the teams have put into, not just their social media channels, but what is really video, audio, podcast, all the skill sets that used to come in a journalism package 40 years ago, when you and I were young? Well,
Mark Hyman 18:08
you know, I don’t stand in judgment of what leagues and teams are doing with respect to content creation, that that’s there’s value in that for them. That’s what they’re doing. We’re doing something different. We’re at the School of Journalism, and, you know, occasion, not occasionally, frequently, we’ll have high school seniors, you know, come through that I meet with, and I meet with their parents, and they’re asking some of the same questions that we’re talking about now. You know, is there a future in this industry? Is journalism going to be a thing in 10 or 15 or 30 years? And, you know, my answer is, yes. I think so. I think that there also will always be demand for objective, you know, arms length reporting of news. But in addition to that, the skills that you learn as a journalist in a school of journalism are transferable to almost anything that you do in your life. If you’re able to communicate in written communication, and you can speak well, that’s a credential. If you’re a lawyer, if you’re, you know, a sports marketing executive. If you’re a neurosurgeon, the ability to speak and write is going to be helpful. If you can, if you’re a good listener, if you’re, you know, able to ask questions and follow a conversation, well, if you’re a critical thinker, if you’re a problem solver, and that’s what journalists do, you know 100 times a day, is figuring out, you know, what is this story really about? What are the voices that really need to be included, what are the questions that I need to be asking this person? How can data inform my thinking about this issue? If you’re learning that in a school of journalism, that’s going to be helpful to you whatever you do in life. So yeah, of course, we we’re happy when our kids become journalists and and, you know, are working at prominent publications and doing great work, and many of them are but, but even if they’re not, they’re benefiting from what they’re learning in the school of journalism. I think, Oh, I
8Nestor Aparicio 20:24
agree wholeheartedly in regard to and especially as I get older. I mean, really, as I get older, I am so grateful for people like you and all the aforementioned. I mean, all of you were mentors to me, and I learned something from all of you. But the one thing that I’ve taken with me, especially as Trump comes into office, is, what is a fact, what is credible? What is real news? What is Fox News? And what, what stands the test of credibility and fact? And, you know, these press conferences that to me, I’ve now been thrown out of I sit in and say there is a standard that’s now set, especially in sports, where they’re just things you can’t ask. They’re just things when you walk into a press conference, there are unwritten things that will either get you thrown out, sneered at, or disrespected in a way that was way different 40 years ago, when you’re sitting with Earl Weaver, I’m sitting with Johnny Oates, Ray Miller, Davy Johnson down the line, which was covering sports, that there’s almost a cafe, part of the wrestling thing, the things we’re not allowed to talk about, the things we’re not going to talk about, the things we’re going to lie to you about, openly, about an injury, about things like that, that then the reporters have to go back and say, what’s got my name on it. I’m writing it because he said it. But is it true? Is it true? And there’s a real different standard for Is it true in regard to modern era, is it true? And I heard it on the internet. We used to call it phone booth. Remember, who’s reporting? It your credibility that comes with a reporter. You’re
Mark Hyman 22:04
writing about your experience, or you’re talking about your experience, I can tell you, when I open the Washington you know, I click over to the Washington Post in the morning and I read Jesse Doherty’s coverage of what’s going on in college sports, or, you know, Ben Strauss’s coverage of sports media, the the level of investigative reporting that’s going on at at not only the Washington Post, but the athletic when I read Kenny Rosenthal’s coverage of Baseball and the athletic, I I don’t feel that I’m, you know, getting a sanitized version of what’s going on in the world of sports. I think that there are many, many sports journalists out there who are extremely skilled at gathering information and analyzing it and presenting it in a way that informs my thinking about the business of sports, about, you know, sports and culture. So I don’t really feel like, you know, journalists have been shut out of access to information that that is important to me. So yeah, in a press conference setting, you’re going to get one version of events, but, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t get the full story as journalists Well, I
Nestor Aparicio 23:25
think even locally, Mark, I mean, you covered the Orioles and saw what that became, and then the Washington football team under Daniel Snyder, there’s plenty of journalism to be done here in regard to how not to do things, as well as how to do things when The capitals win championships, or when the Ravens have been really for the last 20 years, an exemplary franchise of how to put things together and asking questions. Mark Hyman is here. He defends all things journalism and teaches these young people. He is the Director and Professor of the Practice at Shirley perfect center journalism at Merrill college at the University of Maryland. That’s a mouthful. I gotta get all that out, right?
Mark Hyman 24:01
8I’m a terrible guest, because I, you know, I’m going to push back on 90% of what you’re saying. So
Nestor Aparicio 24:08
great. No, no, no, I want you well, mark the whole thing. First off, I love you and I respect you immensely. I invited you on in September for the News America thing, and it didn’t happen, but I reached to you about a week or two ago, because someone very special in my life reached to me on a text and said, My 60 He’s raising his granddaughter as a as a parent. And he said, I’m my 16 year old daughter is just nuts about sports. She wants to be a sports reporter. And I’m like, does that? What does that mean to a 16 because I don’t even know what that means. That means Molly Dunham. To me, that means some serious her. That means SALLY JENKINS. To me, that doesn’t mean necessarily what I see at halftime of grabbing and by the way, that that part of the access journalism interviewing these coaches for 10 seconds on and off. Oh my god, like if that’s what you you want to be when you grow up. I. Try to talk you out of it, but, and there’s only a handful of those jobs, but there’s a wide spectrum of what a 16 year old young lady would want to do. And say, I want to beat and I’m like, do you just like football? Do you just want to be around the players at that point? Do you want to where? What are you writing? What do you think journalism is? Because I think Barstool Sports has certainly changed that when I meet young people, and I would think for you too, that the fine line between what is journalism, what Mark Hyman wants it at the University of Maryland, and what is Barstool Sports and what is internet reporting, and I don’t know what is take journalism right for the modern era. It’s just that we’ve we’re in a different space. What do I say to a 16 year old, what questions would I be asking? Or she really does want to meet with me, Mark, and I want she’s trying to take me seriously. And I’m like, don’t take me seriously. Let me ask Mark. Yeah. I
Mark Hyman 25:57
mean, it’s, I can tell you what I what I tell students, which is, you know, first of all, students come in with a concept of what it means to be a sports journalist, and it usually it’s informed by what they see on TV. So it’s not uncommon for a student to sit down at a conference table in our center and say, you know, I want to be Stephen A Smith, or I want to be Scott man Pell. And the answer, one of the answers, is, you know, you have to know something before you can be Stephen hay Smith. You have to be a reporter for 15 years and have relationships and understand the industry and, you know, have context and institutional memory before you can be a commentator, you don’t. You know you’re not. You don’t graduate from high school and become Stephen A Smith. So that’s number one. Number two is there’s so many opportunities in sports media that that young people are completely unaware of, and I encourage them to keep an open mind. Come here, learn how to be a journalist, and then there will be opportunities that will present themselves. I mean, you know you and I, I know speaking for myself, what really turns me on is being a reporter and being an investigative reporter. I’m not really interested in and it’s a good thing, but I’m not interested in being a superstar TV personality that just would not, you know, scratch that itch for me so that that’s my niche and and we offer students the opportunity to learn how to be a great reporter. We have a broadcast program at Merrill College of Journalism, and we have students who are learning to be in front of a camera and to write scripts and to go out and cover stories. So, you know, I encourage students keep an open mind and and be open to new experiences. And I guarantee you that 90% of the kids who leave our program have a very different career objective, and thought about what they want to do with their lives on the way out, compared to what they did when they were high school seniors and they were thinking about journalists. Yeah,
Nestor Aparicio 28:11
Mark, I for years, I tried to find Luke Jones, right? And Luke went to Syracuse and then came back and became a teacher, and he’s been with me 16, almost 17 years now, as my reporter with The Ravens and the Orioles, and I say to anybody Jack Gibbons would have loved him, anybody would have liked the skill set that he has, and I think he’s wonderful. And I went through hundreds, if not 1000s, of resumes and people. And the amazing part to me that it really blew me away. And maybe this was something when I was 15 years old. And I don’t want to say you were ever impressed by me, but I could at least sit and talk about the Orioles with you. When I was a young person, in regard to knowing things about sports, I was, I am blown away by how many resumes I got, and when I would sit down with people who wanted to do sports radio for a living, which was my vocation. This is in the aughts, maybe, maybe two decades ago, I was always searching for that next Bob Haney or that next Rob long or that next Glenn Clark, or whatever, the person that could do this job. And it was four hours of taking calls and resetting and speaking, communicating as you would have it, and then hopefully later blogging and being able to write. And that was a real mixed bag as far as who can and can’t write. I mean, it’s such a it’s an incredible skill set to be able to write that I take for granted. But knowing sports, I had people, and I would grab them and say, write down the Orioles starting lineup tonight. You want to be a sports radio host on a daily basis, or for an hour, or for five minutes, and then even who was on the team, and I’m thinking about, like, Mark, it was amazing. Like, I gave a pop quiz. Like I literally when they came out to we did it at Hooters one year. We did it at different places for fans to come out and make it fun, you know, make it a crowd setting, like, like, American Idol really, like a. Cry out, you know, like karaoke for sports radio, you know. And I couldn’t believe, like, I was obsessed with sports. And I think the hardest part for me as a hirer was it the journalism part, or, Hey, I can teach you how to reset, right? And I can’t teach you that Johnny United’s play for the Colton they used to be here, if you don’t know that, you know like and I think there was a basis of sports knowledge that goes into being Stephen A Smith or being Scott Van Pelt. That’s just this encyclopedia sports knowledge that people like you and I have, having been in the business, forgotten more about it than most people that it’s really hard to know that much, and how sheltered you’d have to be to know that much, and maybe a little bit about Led Zeppelin too. But like, like I said, very at the beginning of this very specialized, you know, I’m a NASCAR person. I’m a wrestling person. I’m a baseball person. When we grew up, it was a little bit of everything in the it on Sports Center. I don’t know that it’s that way anymore for people’s lane, for being a sports aficionado or their avidity,
8Mark Hyman 31:09
but Nestor, I think that’s just a marketing thing. You know, if you want to cut through the noise, you need to be perceived as as an expert. It’s some, you know, very narrow subject and and, you know, we we encourage students to, you know, become the world’s leading expert on something, no matter how obscure it might be. And that’s, you know, from a social media perspective, that’s going to drive traffic to what you’re doing. But, you know, I wanted to go back to something you said about really, what the what defines excellence in in the candidates that you might be looking at. You know, for me, it really is that the central credential is really the ability to think through problems, that critical thinking ability, which is so important as a journalist that that’s, you know, last year we did a big reporting project that got some national attention on on youth tackle football in communities of color. And, you know, tackle football for kids participation is declining across the country because of what we know about the risk of head injury, but in communities of color, kids are still playing tackle football, and in fact, those numbers are increasing. And we wanted to understand why. We had some ideas, but we really wanted to do a deep dive on that, and we had four months to do it. We had 12 students in a room, and to watch the students think their way around this project was really fascinating. One of the things we wanted to know is, where do most well, let me reset. So we wanted to understand per capita, where what communities produce the most college football players, major college football players. Well,
Nestor Aparicio 33:04
I mean, we’re Lamar Jackson, South Florida, Texas, the South is what I would what I would say.
Mark Hyman 33:09
Well, we wanted to do it in a more analytical way. So we have a great data journalism faculty here at Maryland. We arranged to scrape the rosters of every power five conference football team, 68 football teams, and and collect in a spreadsheet the hometowns of more than 8000 players on those teams. And then we were able to look analyze that data and come up with a list of like the top 15 communities per capita that produced college football players. And that led us to a community in Mississippi, population 1200 that per capita produced as many college football players as any place in the country, and we sent two student reporters down there to talk to people about why that was the case. And what we discovered is this is a dirt No, that’s a pejorative. It’s a very challenged community economically, and there’s really nothing going on of consequence. Then if kids want to leave that community for a better life, they better be football players who are going to get college scholarships. So, and that
Nestor Aparicio 34:31
8might have been a basketball story you would have written 40 years here in Baltimore, right, like, to some degree with the Dunbar,
Mark Hyman 34:37
you could have written it, but you you wouldn’t have had the data to support the, you know, the community as to why you went to Mississippi. Right, right. So the, you know, my point in raising this is the students in that room thought their way around this story, you know, in a very impressive way, and the project reflected that. And, you know. When, if I were a hiring manager, if I were the sports editor of a publication, that’s what I would want. I could teach the person how to write, how to listen better, but that critical thinking piece, you know, I think that’s kind of baked in, and that’s such an important, you know, kind of a core credential for a journalist, and something that I really value. See people
Nestor Aparicio 35:22
I don’t like conflict in a general sense, like I’m anti conflict, but you and I would be good conflict if I, if I went Rodney Dangerfield and all Thornton melon, and I wrote an honorarium to get myself into the Philip merrily, because I don’t think I could qualify. But if I came down there and spent a couple semesters with you, you and I would fight like cats and dogs, and I’d respect the hell out of you because I do to begin with, and I try to listen to you as much as I could listen to anybody. I listen to lawyers and I listen to doctors, generally. When they tell me, I’m like, I don’t fight with them, but I would fight with you a little bit about these different things. But I think the the the place you’re coming from with young people and what you’ve lived in your life for journalism. I want you to be right. I’m pulling for you. I’m pulling for all these young people that can factor into a Trump Landia and into an AI world, and a world where, if you don’t like Twitter, you just buy it and wreck it, you know, from, you know, like, literally, you don’t like the Baltimore Sun, buy it and wreck it. Like, so, yeah, you don’t fit. You buy the Washington Post. You don’t want to stop endorsing presidential to stop, you know, like, so, I think the standards at the top, from Bezos to Sinclair, of what journalism and old mastheads were, but I’m in agreement with you. There’s going to be another thing, a future thing. I don’t know where that is, but I’m glad that you’re at least educating these young people and giving them a chance. And I’m glad 16 year old young people still come to me and want to do something, at least in the journalism space, or what they perceive to be, but I think that’s one of the issues I have with young people. Do you want to be in sports because you want to do your hair and be on TV or do because that’s what you see and that’s what you know, or do you really want to be a reporter and and where will the job be on that? And I’m I’m muddled on that, but the more time I spend with you and you around these young people getting these gigs, the more heartened I am that when my grandkids do come along, there will be something and won’t be the Baltimore Sun or the news American, but it’ll be something trustworthy, incredible, that comes with critical thinking and comes with facts that I can trust. And you mentioned Ken Rosenthal. People been trusting him for 40 years, right? Everybody that listens to me trust me, because I haven’t lied to him for 40 years and but that’s one of the issues that with education and with all the things you can pursue in life, this is all I ever wanted to do. I had a chat with a friend of mine a couple weeks ago who’s a sports agent, and I’m like, Oh my God, you chase these kids around and like. And I’m like, I do do something else. He’s like, dude, I’m almost 60. This is all I’ve ever done. I ain’t doing anything else. And I feel the same way about me that this is all I’ve ever done, and it’s really important that people like you and universities, you know, keep this on the up and up, or try to hold power accountable, which is what I said to Chad Steele when he threw me out. He asked me what I do, and I said, I hold power accountable. That’s what I do. So I’m still doing that without access, but I feel like someone has to hold power accountable. And I think at base, that’s what journalism does, what’s fact and what’s fiction. And here’s your proof right
Mark Hyman 38:32
now. The bottom line is that sports media is alive and well, that there are, there are university programs like ours, where kids are getting a very solid foundation in journalism. Some are are going on to become journalists at the Washington Post and The New York Times and The Baltimore Sun, and others are going on to other fields where they’re using the skills that are required to be a journalist to do other things and and, you know, so we’re not saving the world down here. I don’t think, but, but I do think that there’s value in the skills that a journalist really needs to do a good job. And that hasn’t changed since you and I were sitting in the newsroom at the news American 40 years ago. Well,
8Nestor Aparicio 39:18
for what you do and Northwestern and Missouri, the Big J schools that I could never get into, that I always wanted to, but the big journalism schools, like the one you run at Maryland in College Park, how many of your graduates are going to work for teams? Because that’s there are a lot of jobs there. You must. It’s not the same. I called it Mean Gene Okerlund, and if that’s burgeoning fab at it, um, but you the that part of perceived journalism, and that’s exactly why they want to hire them, because it comes with this credibility that comes with, I went to a journalism school. I know how to ask questions and present them.
Mark Hyman 39:59
Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it’s interesting. First of all, yes, students are going to end up at, you know, team and and, and league websites and, and some of them are going to make a lot of money and are going to progress through the ranks and are going to be executives at those teams. That’s fine, if they’re taking the skills, the journalism skills that we’re teaching and leveraging that to do something else that’s not we’re not unhappy about that, but you know, as I said, there are lots and lots of examples of our students working in media and and in a traditional way. So, but you know, to your point, content creation is, is, is different than journalism. I mean, what? Let’s be honest about it. You know, if you’re a journalist, you’re in a position to write more objectively about events. You’re not working for someone who has a direct stake in in the way that you cover the issue. Although, you know, I can tell you when I worked for the Baltimore Sun in the 1980s the owner of the Baltimore Orioles was a member of the times mirror board. Eli Jacobs was on the times mirror board. And do you think that he was interested in what I was writing about the Orioles? He certainly was. And did that affect coverage? I mean, not day to day, but the idea that, you know, even if you’re working for a traditional news organization, there aren’t people who have an opinion about the issues you’re writing about. Of course they do. So you know, there are very few places in the world where you can work as a journalist, where you know the people in positions of authority have no agenda zero. It happens, but, but rarely. So look, I’m a journalist and and I personally prefer to work on the journalism side, but I don’t stand in judgment of anyone who’s working on the content creation side. I just think you have to be transparent about it. It’s different than journalism.
Nestor Aparicio 42:11
Yeah, and being a columnist, and that’ll be our next visit. We’ll talk about columnists and criticism and modern times in social media, which becomes a toilet in the fourth quarter of any game, fire, the coach, bench, the quarterback. I like the black guy. I like the white guy. The defensive coordinator is the problem. The offensive court, I mean, on and on and on. But I grew up reading people like you, and reading columnists that had all of the above, the critical thinking, the questioning the deep, deep historical context of storytelling and and we’ll get to that on our next episode. Mark Hyman is here. He is the director Hang on, and Professor of the Practice, Shirley povid, center of Sports Journalism at Merrill college at the University of Maryland, at College Park. And that all fits on one card. He’s been my friend for 40 years, an incredible mentor to me. You all the John Eisenberg’s all the the Step Up, older guys, come on. Don’t do that. Don’t act like Don’t be from Dundalk. Come on. Stop that. And it didn’t work anyway, I still got thrown out marks. I’m sorry I shamed you in the way I have, but I am really appreciative your time and your wisdom, and what you’re doing with young people, um, for your university. And you do a couple like, sort of Super Bowl video things, and invite people down, and they always have a really cool theme about women in journalism or just all sorts of different things you do. How many times do you do those symposiums? Because they come to me, and they always have people on, on, on your on your days that I’m familiar with, or former friends of mine, or whatever. But those things are really cool when you put them together. And I’m thinking that that’s right in
Mark Hyman 43:49
8your wheelhouse, right? Former friends of yours, Nestor? Yes, yeah. I thought sometimes, once you are a friend of Nestor, who are a friend of Nestor for life,
Nestor Aparicio 43:57
some people have ghosted me, Mark. You can’t imagine they get too close to me, they might lose their post credentials too.
Mark Hyman 44:03
Wow, that’s true. I’m not worried about it. I know. Thank you. Once a year we have a public event that we refer to as a symposium. Last year we had Adam Silver on campus and Ted Leon says, talking about future of the NBA again. You know, our thing is, how does sports touch the world beyond sports? So we’re looking for topics that are sports, but sports, race, gender, business, health and safety, ethics. So as I said last year, it was Adam Silver and Ted Leon says this year we did, as you said, an event on the year of women in sports, and we had this incredible panel of mostly sports journalists, but an executive from ESPN, Phil dipicchioto, started a big sports marketing agency called octagon, represents Simone Biles. Among others, talking about what happened this year. I mean, of course, Caitlin Clark happened, but what happened this year that explains the kind of jet propulsion that is occurring in women’s sports? That was a really cool panel. So that that’s something that we do, that anybody can come to public event free. Just come to college park and enjoy if you go to our website, you’ll also see the projects that our students do every year. Last summer, a group of students and I spent the summer in or spent a couple of weeks in Africa for a project on the growth of basketball in Africa and what the NBA is doing to try to grow interest in the sport and to identify talent, because there’s some, as we know, there’s some incredible basketball talent in Africa. And Nestor, I mentioned to you yesterday that several students are working on a documentary that’s going to drop in a couple of weeks about this academy in Senegal that the NBA has created for they Scout talent from around the continent. They bring these teenagers to Senegal, and many of them go on to play college basketball. One was drafted directly into the NBA, in the NBA draft a couple of months ago, and we spent several days with these kids who are coming from, you know, all over the continent, some of them, you know, from incredibly challenged backgrounds. They’ve grown up in in refugee camps that they’re, you know, basketball for them, is more than a sport. It’s a way to not only improve their lives, but the lives of their families and their communities. So that’s our thing. You know? How does sports touch the world beyond sports? And I think our kids really, when they leave, they’ve had these incredible experiences of thinking in sports in a much broader way. Yeah, I wish
Nestor Aparicio 47:02
the News America would have stayed in business the last 40 years. So you could have been the baseball writer there, and I could read it, and I could be the columnist and all that stuff. But as it turns out, you’re out serving the world in a better place. Mark Hyman is that at the University of Maryland, a good man, a long time mentor and friend of four decades. And how you’ve been in Maryland maybe a decade now? How long now
8Mark Hyman 47:20
I’ve been here for five years. Five years, okay, George Washington University for eight years before that. So I’ve been teaching for quite a while now.
Nestor Aparicio 47:29
Well, thank goodness for you to having. You’re giving me hope with these stories. Say, can I read the Mississippi thing? Can I find that?
Mark Hyman 47:36
Absolutely I will. I will email that to you, and then you, I know will want to share it with the millions and millions of of your fans. It’s
Nestor Aparicio 47:46
just 100,000 it’s not millions. I’m a journalist. I can, I can document the 100,000 I can’t document the under 1000 especially now that you know millions. So my listeners are dying off because we’re getting to be old around here. In 40 years of doing this, we are celebrating 26 years of w, N, S, T, 33 years I have a crazy documentary out that’s 40 years old from my beginnings at the Baltimore news, American and sports first. There’s also a great piece Mark was not a part of but several of our colleagues from 40 years ago were part of this infamous photo that I shared, which we had a lot of fun of after the death of rich Pietro. So hello to all of our news Americans and na alums and anybody out there that loves journalism. Mark Hyman is a great follow, as well as send the kids and now the grandkids down to to see Mark, and he’ll teach them the right way to do things. And by the way, I would have thought community wise, I spent a lot of time in Hawaii in the last 10 years. It’s amazing how football centric Hawaii is, and like when you’re in Japan, how baseball centric Japan is, you know, just in different places and communities. So I’m really looking forward to this Mississippi thing. I’ll definitely check that. Mark Hyman is the Director and Professor of the Practice at the Shirley povid Center for Sports Journalism at the Merrill college at the University of Maryland College Park. Even says, University. I’m trying to get it all out. At some point, I’ll find all 188 of our mutual friends on LinkedIn, and they’ll all disown me for for all the things I’ve said to you, I love you, Mark. I appreciate you. Keep teaching them right way down there. Alright, great catching up. Nestor, like Crosby stones, Nestor, teach the children well, I’m Nestor. We are W, N, S, T, am 1570 Towson, Baltimore, we never stop talking. Baltimore, positive. I feel bad about not shaving for Mark. I feel less than professional. You.
