How I Became a Media Business Person: Part 1
A personal essay for no reason other than people say writing is good exercise and I’m trying to stay fit [I added footnotes in the comments section]
When I graduated college, I was fortunate enough to immediately start a good job selling access to a marketing database. The now defunct company was a Hoover’s competitor and the little subsidiary I worked for was owned by a larger out of state company that had a strong, sales driven culture. In retrospect, it was an amazing first job. We generated a good amount of revenue and the company was ahead of its time in terms of search engine optimization: The shark tank was always filled with hot leads. We learned the art of generating demand, customer service and how not (or I suppose, how) to “snipe” your fellow sales peoples’ leads. We were always closing and it was an extremely solid experience I will always be grateful for, but the truth is, something was missing.
When I wasn’t selling access to the database, I was reading blogs. This was 2004/2005 so the word blog could still easily inspire sarcastic remarks and the sales bullpen certainly loved to dabble in poking fun at each other so I immediately became the resident “blog reader.” At one point the rousing was so enjoyed, my boss moved me to outside his office so he could annouce to the rest of the team whenever he saw the dreaded “yellow background.” For my benefit with future employers, I would like to make it clear that my former boss is now my good friend and that he was happy with my sales production at the time, he just wanted to make sure the team knew I was reading blogs. Thanks, boss.
So what was the dreaded yellow background? At the time, it mostly belonged to one Mr. William A. Simmons and his Sports Guy column on ESPN.COM’s Page 2. I was aware of the Sports Guy thanks to his sharing of Page 2 space with Hunter S. Thompson though I didn’t really start reading the Sports Guy columns until I received a personal recommendation. My friend who I respected on all things media continually recommended the Sports Guy [1]. Amazingly you no longer have to share college housing with someone to get trusted media recommendations, you can just follow people on Twitter (Joe, who can be found on Twitter here, also introduced me to one Mr. Kan A. Yeezy before anyone else– listening to Through the Wire for the first time in his room is one of my most vivid and lucid college memories [2]).
After Joe’s recommendation, Bill Simmons became my go to writer. I read anything he wrote voraciously. The combination of first person, regular guy narrative voice, Boston homerism and pop culture references was, I think, like nothing else I had read before. Reading his articles was like a hot knife cutting through butter for me. In high school, sports had been a light passion; I enjoyed playing, and had not yet gotten into professional sports (most namely football, because I was and still am a Mets and Knicks fan). The reason I bring this up is because I enjoyed reading Simmons so much, I became a New England Patriots fan which is sacrilege for a guy from Long Island. In my defense, my father was a 49'ers fan, my mother didn’t like football at all and I went to college in Boston from 2000-2004 [3]. So I guess I’m a front running, Sports Guy fan which sounds like Deadspin’s worst nightmare circa this time. Irony abound because of the connection Simmons would later provide me with to Deadspin.
Ed Note: I know it’s weird to publish this in parts, but I wanted to hit publish and I can’t finish it since I have to go a meeting now. P.S. Thanks for reading!
