SPORTS NEWS YOU CAN USE

Issue 46 -- Careers in Television Sports Production

The past few issues have covered television sportscasting. There are also careers behind the cameras. Given the number of books which explain the nuts and bolts of television production, I'm only going to cover the topic to the extent to which it relates to sports. If you want more information on television production, you might want to go to this website. In addition, many colleges, continuing ed programs, and public access television stations provide training and certification in this field.

Televised sports coverage, both on location and in the studio, takes a tremendous amount of equipment, manpower, and planning. Here are some examples:

• Trans World International, a television production company, used 35 cameras, eight mobile units, seven helicopters, four motorcycles, and a pickup truck to cover the 1998 New York City Marathon. (1)
  
  
• ESPN used 40-45 people (30 from ESPN and 10-15 hired locally) to cover the 1997 Humanitarian Bowl in Boise, Idaho. Included were six cameramen, two video technicians, three audio technicians, a technical director, three replay technicians, three graphics technicians, two statisticians, a spotter, the on-air talent, a stage manager, a time-out coordinator, a runner, a producer, an operating producer, and an associate director.

To get ready for the broadcast, the crew spent ten hours laying 7,000 feet of video cable and 6,500 feet of audio cable. Said producer Bryan Carter, a freelancer working for ESPN, ''It's extremely hectic. It's a collection of professional road warriors. Everybody knows their role and their position. Everything has to be done in timely fashion.

"It takes a lot of manpower to get that cable spread throughout the stadium, not only for the cameras, but for audio, headsets and communications. People don't realize how much work goes into preparing for these things.'' (2)

Six cameras were used during the game (one at each end zone, one at each 25-yard line, a sideline camera, and a booth camera). Carter and the show's directors sat in the production truck looking at 50-60 monitors and working the audio and video playback systems.

• CTV, a Canadian network, covered the 1998 Canadian Open golf tournament with over 200 people, 25 cameras, and 37 kilometers of electrical cables strung across the course. Within the on-site production truck, eight people tracked the action on 68 monitors. Thirteen hours of air time were produced at a cost of $600,000. (3)

Jeff Mather, a producer for CTV, noted, "Golf is the biggest to do, the most expensive, and toughest, too, because every player's doing something different, and we have to stay on top of all of it. It's not like hockey, where you set up on the same day, follow the puck around, and then pack it up after the game." (4)

• CBS covered the 1998 PGA Championship with approximately 250 people and 28 cameras. (5) For the U.S. Open golf tournament, NBC used approximately 185 people, 35 cameras, 18 replay machines, 100 monitors, thousands of feet of cable, and a blimp. Said NBC executive producer Tom Roy, "When you think of other sports broadcasts -- football, basketball, baseball -- there's one ball in play and all the players are concentrated on that ball. At the U.S. Open, there are 72 balls in play at any one time, each with its own player, who has his own story. It's up to us to decide which are the best stories to be telling." (6)
  
  
• ESPN used 22,000 feet of cable, more than 15 cameras, two TV trucks (one to control game-time operations and another for all pregame, half-time, and postgame operations), and more than 100 TV monitors to cover the 1998 Women's Final Four NCAA basketball tournament. More than 70 engineers and 50 production personnel were involved, each one with his or her own responsibility (e.g., one handled on-screen score updates; another controlled the volume at 25 on-court microphones). (7)
  
  ESPN used approximately 600 people to tape its 1997 X Games, an event which only had 175 competitors. (8)
  
  
• NBC used 14 mobile units, 81 office trailers, 95 cameras, 270 tape machines, 638,000 feet of cable, and 500 engineers to cover the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. One 33-member strategic unit operated on location from a 40-foot trailer where they edited footage and narration on the spot and then broadcast it via satellite. Another 300 staffers worked in the Olympic broadcast center at NBC headquarters in New York. In all, NBC had 2,500 staffers assigned to the Olympics -- a ratio of one staffer to four competitors. (9)
  
  
• ESPN broadcasts three different editions of its news show, "SportsCenter," every evening. Each has its own crew, including coordinating producer, producer, director, associate producer, assignment editor, researcher, production assistants, and two co-hosts. Each staff meets three times during the day: once for initial planning, then for detailed story schedules, and then for a postmortem after their show. (10)

According to Anne Marie Jeffords, who served on the assignment desk, "I sort of orchestrate the show, starting with the morning list from the wires, the papers, a few phone calls, tips from people I know. I have four brothers who give me ideas sometimes. I call local TV stations -- ABC affiliates mostly [ESPN is 80% owned by Capital Cities/ABC] -- for leads and to set up feeds on stories. I buy satellite time when the feeds are set. Busy days are the best. On a day with no news, we just start making calls. We try to remember stories we can follow up. Like, 'Hey, didn't so-and-so have pneumonia a while ago? Let's find out how he is.' So we call, and someone on the other end of the line will say, 'My god, he's been cured for months. Why are you asking about him? Get a life!'" (11) (If you want more information on what goes into putting together "SportsCenter," check out the book, The Big Show, by Keith Olbermann and Dan Patrick.)

People who want to get into the production side of sports journalism start at the bottom. And even that is competitive. ESPN gets 900 job applications a year for production assistant spots. Approximately 20% of those who get interviews get into the network's seven month internship program. Of those, approximately 65-70% are hired full time. Said Al Jaffe, director of talent and production recruitment, "It's like being the admissions director at Harvard. We get to choose from the best and the brightest." (12)

Suzannah Rugh was working at ESPN as a PA in 1992. Before that she was an intern at a TV station in Illinois. She met Jaffe at sports career convention in Phoenix. "Mr. Jaffe received 400 resumes in all, and he picked out five to interview.

"One day I'm wearing shorts to work in Phoenix, the next day I'm in Bristol [Connecticut where ESPN is located]. I love what I do. I hate the hours, and I have no life. I tape SportsCenter on my nights off, and last night, my only night off, I watched Monday Night Football. I'm working Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas and New Year's Eve." (13)

According to Jaffe, the interview process goes like this: "I'll ask the general background things at first but then test their sports knowledge by asking about their favorite team and asking them to assess their strengths and weaknesses. I want to learn about their depth of knowledge." (14)

Said Glenn Jacobs, another PA at ESPN in 1992, "I am just thrilled to have made it through my trial. You see, I'm a government and theater major from Connecticut College, and I took the job originally because I planned to be an actor and I wanted to see what TV was like behind the scenes. I was under sort of a stigma here because I had no TV background, and I wasn't sure myself if I could do it. Now I've proven you don't have to be a technical wizard to succeed here.

"It isn't brain surgery, but it is pretty demanding. You need to develop a creative thought process that allows you to say to yourself, I am the only person in America seeing this game. I am the only source in the whole world for people to enjoy this game. Therefore I have to be organized, I have to be creative, I have to be perfect." (15) (In 1997, ESPN's series, "Outside the Lines," won a CableAce Award for best sports information series. Jacobs and Jeffords were among the show's feature producers.)

Part of being an entry level employee at ESPN means watching lots of sports events. Every sports event being broadcast anywhere on television is monitored by someone at ESPN who watches the entire event, makes note of key plays, and then creates a video with a few seconds of highlights. On some Saturdays there are more than 100 games to monitor. Currently ESPN uses 110 production assistants.

Over the years, six PAs have moved up the ladder to become coordinating producers, ESPN's highest level of producer. Noted Deb Vogel, the coordinating producer for ESPN's interview show, "Up Close," and a former Harvard track athlete, "You have to be very into sports. They test you in subtle ways. 'Do you know this?' I'm not a stat geek, I don't belong to a rotisserie league, but I have a very good general knowledge, a good foundation." (16)

NFL Films, the television production unit of the National Football League, also brings in future producers at a low level. Said president Steve Sabol, "We start a lot of our producers when they're 18 or 19 years old, or just out of college. They work here as interns, and then they go to become production assistants, then associate producers, then to producers. So they're aware of our tradition and the style of moviemaking." (17)

Yet another example of a company committed to training future television producers was Atlanta Olympic Broadcasting, an international corporation set up to provide television coverage of the 1996 Olympics to countries around the world. It established the Host Broadcast Training Program, which was sponsored by the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games and received $300,000 to cover administrative costs and $2 million in equipment. Approximately 1,200 students from 50 U.S. colleges were given the opportunity to participate in a two-year, three-phrase training program. They had to make an 18-month commitment to the program, which involved taking at least six communications courses, followed by hands-on training at Clark Atlanta University. From all those who went through the training, 650-800 were chosen to work at the Olympics as audio assistants, commentary systems operators, liaison officers, camera assistants, camera operators, video operators assistants, video tape operators, and loggers. During the two to 12 weeks they were employed in Atlanta, they lived in low-cost housing and were paid from $75 to $400 a day.

Another route into sports television is through a research job. NBC chose three researchers for the 1996 Olympics from 800 applicants. One had a political science degree from Princeton and had been a sportswriter for a small chain of New York weekly newspapers; another had a degree in philosophy and economics from Columbia University and had been a gofer for host Bob Costas at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and a researcher for Sports Illustrated; the third had a degree in comparative literature from Dartmouth.

For two years they traveled around the world interviewing athletes, coaches, and officials. They also wrote approximately 2,000 athlete biographies, created country and pronunciation guides, and compiled statistics. This research was collected into notebooks which were then given to NBC's Olympics producers and on-camera hosts. (18)

Yet another route into production is by becoming a runner. They are freelancers that networks hire for a day's worth of odd jobs. Some of them travel from event to event, paying their own expenses. Golf runners earn $50 to $75 a day. CBS sportscaster Jim Nantz got his first television job as a runner. So did ABC golf producer Jack Graham, who, in 1978, did 60 shows in 52 weeks while he was a senior at the University of Southern California.
According to CBS senior associate producer Chuck Will (with 30 years of golf coverage to his credit), "There are so few jobs in television it's ridiculous. You can go through communications college, or you can come to me. Hang with me for a summer, you learn more than in four years of college." (19)

1 The New York Times, October 30, 1998.
2 The Idaho Statesman, December 28, 1997.
3 The Toronto Star, September 13, 1998.
4 The Calgary Sun, June 21, 1998.
5 The (Tacoma, WA) News Tribune, August 9, 1998.
6 The San Francisco Chronicle, June 12, 1998.
7 The Kansas City Star, March 28, 1998.
8 Electronic Media, April 13, 1998.
9 Chicago Tribune, July 14, 1996.
10 Sports Illustrated, December 21, 1992.
11 Sports Illustrated, December 21, 1992.
12 The Boston Globe, September 18, 1998.
13 Sports Illustrated, December 21, 1992.
14 The Boston Globe, September 18, 1998.
15 Sports Illustrated, December 21, 1992.
16 St. Petersburg Times, November 16, 1996.
17 (New York, NY) Newsday, December 14, 1997.
18 The Atlanta Journal, July 22, 1996.
19 Sports Illustrated, May 4, 1998.

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