Chris Herring, author of "Blood in the Garden" on 90's Knicks; senior lecturer at Northwestern
episode
Breaking In with Kevin Fishbain: A Sports Media Podcast
50 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is Chris Herring’s background and how did he get started in sports journalism?
Hey everyone, welcome to Breaking In with Kevin Fishbane, the podcast that tells the origin stories of your favorite sports media personalities. It's episode 62, and my guest is Chris Herring, Senior Lecturer at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism and the New York Times best-selling author of Blood in the Garden, The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks. With the NBA finals in full swing, game four at Madison Square Garden is tonight. If you're listening when this episode drops, I thought it'd be great to have Chris on. His book on the nineties Knicks is one of my favorite sports books. At the end of this episode, he's gonna offer his perspective on what this all means to New York and to Knicks fans.
See, prior to joining Medill, Chris spent two years covering the NBA for ESPN, which was his second stint at the worldwide leader. He spent nearly five years at 538 and got his start in journalism as a sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the New York Knicks. How did he land at such a big time publication right out of college? Well, Chris's origin story begins where a couple of our previous episodes have Homewood Flossmore High School in the south suburbs of Chicago, and then Michigan, where you're going to hear play Plenty of stories how Chris navigated the student newspaper in Ann Arbor and helped parlay some of those experiences into internships in Cleveland and then the Wall Street Journal.
Before we get to Chris, a reminder of recent episodes. Last week was the athletic senior soccer writer Paul Tenorio, a great episode to listen to for the start of the World Cup. Prior to Paul was John Boog Shambi, television voice of the Chicago Cubs. Be sure to add this podcast on all of your listening platforms and tell your friends. All right, here's how Chris Herring broke in. Chris Herring, I was just telling you before we started, you have made Homewood Flossmore High School, maybe the official high school is podcast, 'cause you were the third guest from HoFlow joining Lawrence Holmes and Jason Benetti. So with that, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. Um, I'm in good company to to be with those two on the list.
So I heard on a podcast that your mom thought one day that you were gonna be a sports agent because of the way you memorize sp sports cards and you know, like a lot of people I've had in the show, like a lot of us, you were just obviously this diehard sports fan. Um, when did that interest in sports kind of turn into an interest in sports writing.
Uh, I can remember the essentially the first moment. Um, you and I were just talking off the air a moment ago about um Holman Flossmore, the high school I went to, which has a really good opportunity for students. There's a newspaper, a T V station, and a radio station at the high school. I remember I was a sophomore, uh, finishing sophomore year and my best friend, we we have different electives that we could pick at our high school. Normally like one class a quarter semester that you could take that was like outside of the basic things we had to take, core classes you had to take. And my best friend told me that he had taken journalism and I was like I didn't even know we could take that. Like and I was I I like was begging him to tell me more about the class and the way it was structured was
There was a journalism class that you could take kind of for beginners. And then if you liked it and wanted to continue on with it, the second time you took the class was like to be part of the newspaper staff. And it was a class that you would take to help put the newspaper together. I think every either three weeks or four weeks that we would do it. And so I it became like my focal point. Like the only homework I wanted to work on when I went home was my journalism class and so much so that the journalism teacher actually um started kind of letting me sit in on some of the newspaper class despite the fact that I had not been through the two semesters of the class. And they actually went on a trip to San Diego to some like national journalism high school journalism conference.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is Chris Herring’s background and how did he get started in sports journalism?
0:10–7:10
2
How did a high‑school newspaper and a journalism class shape Chris’s early career?
7:10–14:01
3
What experiences at the University of Michigan’s Daily (the Michigan Daily) helped launch his professional path?
14:01–19:47
4
How did Chris land his Wall Street Journal internship and what did he learn there?
19:47–26:59
5
What were the key moments in Chris’s career at the Wall Street Journal and ESPN covering the Knicks?
26:59–33:21
6
What advice does Chris give to young journalists breaking into the industry today?
33:21–39:24
7
How does Chris view the Knicks’ 2023‑24 NBA Finals run and its impact on New York City?
39:24–45:07
8
What final thoughts and take‑aways does Chris share about his journey and the future of sports media?
45:07–50:45
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Breaking In with Kevin Fishbain: A Sports Media Podcast
Mike Hall, Big Ten Network studio host
Tom Waddle and Marc Silverman, hosts of "Waddle and Silvy" on ESPN 1000 Chicago
Adam Schein, host of "Schein on Sports" on SiriusXM
Christine Brennan, USA Today columnist and author of "On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women's Sports"
Brittany Ghiroli, senior MLB writer at The Athletic
Ross Dellenger, Yahoo senior college football reporter