Learning from the Sports Medium

In Specialized Reporting, when Dr. Perreault first mentioned we would get to speak to professionals, the one that stuck out the most, was Sean Morrison of ESPN. I'll be honest, it was more for the fact of someone working for my dream company, than the man himself. That's solely because I was not familiar with Sean before I saw his name as a speaker.

Being that my dream is to fall into sports media, as I did that for multiple years, including four years at Appalachian State's student newspaper, The Appalachian, I've always had a joy in bringing the event to the reader. You can't be there? Let me tell you about it, like you were there.

Getting to hear Sean talk to us about his career, and how he got to where he was interesting to say the least. As he talked about his time at ESPN, interested to hear about any fears when the company began laying people off over the past couple of years.

What I took the most from his answer, is to be versatile. When you get in with a company, you want to get ingrained as much as you can, and learn all that you're able to. It made sense, because you want to be an invaluable asset. Basically, it's to prove you can do multiple jobs. The more you know, the more valuable you are to the company.

What I also was interested to hear him talk about was the growth of E-sports. Fro those unaware, E-sports are competitions that take place digitally. For example, games like Fortnite, Overwatch, League of Legends, have matches, or battles, where people fight each other to be declared the winner. Most of these events are hosted on Twitch, a streaming website.

While Sean said E-ports have been around for roughy 20 years, I was curious if he knew if a company like ESPN, Fox, NBC and so on would jump at the chance to put them on national television. His answer was a little different. While they (ESPN) would discuss if they needed to be worried about one of the rival companies, Amazon is one that now needs to be a part of those discussions. When the Overwatch League launched early this year it appeared solely on Twitch, which is owned by Amazon.

Amazon agreed to be a the host, at two years, for over $90 million. Blizzard Entertainment, earns over $45 million, a year, to have the game appear only on Twitch.

Tossing that much money around, proves the world of E-sports is here to stay, and

soon to become more mainstream than it already is.

For someone who wants to go into sports media, E-sports seems like a potential area to dive into covering. If you asked me that five or 10 years before Wednesday, I wouldn't have believed it.