Geoff Goldman joins us from the regional television provider, Fox Sports Midwest. He shares his experience as part of the Marketing Public Relations at Business Office of Fox Sports Midwest. My name is Geoff Goldman and I'm the Senior Director of Communications for Fox Sports Midwest, Fox Sports Kansas City, and Fox Sports Indiana, which are regional sports television networks based here in the Midwest. We televise home team games in our markets, specifically the St. Louis Cardinals, the St. Louis Blues, Kansas City Royals, and Indiana Pacers. I'm a 1998 Medill grad. My concentration was in print journalism, specifically newspapers. While I was at Northwestern, I was really highly involved in WNUR radio in the sports department there. I'm responsible for all internal and mostly external communications, media relations, publicity, generating publicity for our programming on our television network, and also handling any sensitive issues around our business and dealing with the media on that. So, first and foremost is dealing with the media. Over the last 17 years, the scope of the job has broadened, and a lot of that is because the media landscape has changed so much. So, social media strategy is part of my job now. I work on a regular basis with our team partners, the Cardinals, Royals, Blues, and Pacers. Seventeen years ago when I started, let's say I landed a story about our network or about our programming on the cover of the local sports section, that was a huge win. That's still a big deal now, but it's only a small piece of the puzzle because the media landscape has become so fractured or splintered or whatever term you want to use. So now, that print piece of the publicity can only be one component if you want to reach a large number of people. Obviously, television is a big medium by which to reach people, but you've got to be real cognizant of a digital strategy as well. So, what are we going to do? What print publicity can we get? What television publicity can we get? What can we get in the digital and blogosphere? What can we do on social media? How can we use the assets of our partners, primarily these teams that we work with whose games we televise, they have a big presence in the digital space too, so how can we use their assets and their heft, their presence in the local marketplace to amplify what we're doing? Then the other part of it is, not specific to my job, but just how do we, as a television network, adapt to the changing way that people are consuming television. We have a streaming product where if you're a cable television subscriber, you can log into our Fox Sports Go app on your phone or your tablet and watch our games that way. Fox is also adapting to that changing cable landscape by making sure it's channels are included in so-called skinny bundles or over the top streaming television services that have emerged over the last couple of years, Sling TV, DirecTV, Hulu, YouTube as a new live streaming product, Fox's channels including our channels, the regional sports channels are included in all of those bundles. You want to get into PR specifically an understanding of how all these different forms of media, how people at these media entities do their job, how does a writer think, how does a reporter think, how does a producer or editor do their job so that you've got an understanding of how they do it and what they maybe thinking. So, getting exposure to all those different forms of media I think is helpful. Obviously, you got to be able to write, and Medill has always preached that, but you got to be able to write succinctly and clearly. Succinctly is probably more important than ever before because we all get bombarded with so many emails, especially writers, reporters, editors, so many pitches that come their way on a regular basis. For students who really want to get into sports, don't limit your job search. People think when they think of sports and media, they think of ESPN. When they think of working in sports marketing or other parts of sports, they think, well, they got to work for a team, and there are so many other job opportunities that are attached to sports that aren't with the big media companies or with the teams. You can be at a regional sports network like I am, you could be with a marketing or PR agency that specializes in sports. So, just realize that there are a lot of good jobs in sports that aren't necessarily in the first place that students think of.
