Journalist Profile: Stewart Manel

Mandel at a Ohio State vs. Penn State game.

Here is another story I did for class. In this piece, we had to find a journalist and do a profile on his or her career. I was lucky enough to meet with Stewart Mandel, a senior writer for SI.com. I actually read his columns a lot and enjoy the humor he uses in his work. I was really glad to meet him and work on this story. Hope you enjoy as well.

Sometimes even a person’s favorite thing to write about can become repetitive after a decade. That was the case when Stewart Mandel, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated’s Web site SI.com, decided he needed to take a break after 10 years of covering football championship games, writing a book and churning out a handful of stories a week.

           

Mandel’s bosses at SI granted him a five month sabbatical in February, and the break appears to have helped as he is now in the thick of college football season. Just being a fan again gave him a new perspective that vanished for a while as a reporter.

“As much as you really try not to, you lose your inner fan on this job,” Mandel said. “You don’t get a lot of opportunities to just sit and watch a game from a purely fun, recreational standpoint.”

Mandel, in his early 30s, rarely takes a full weekend off from covering college football. If his weekend doesn’t include a trip to Eugene, Ore., or Columbus, Ohio, he can spend a Friday in his office 32 stories up in the Time-Life Building sorting through hundreds of e-mails for his popular “College Football Mailbag” column. The tiring part comes when the same re-hashed comments from readers fill his inbox.

“You know that starting around now there will be nothing but bitching about the BCS,” Mandel said about college football’s often despised bowl game format. “There are 400 e-mails in (my inbox) and more than half of them are about the BCS.” That is some of the monotony Mandel deals with in his job, but it is still a dream job that he never pictured himself in when started out as a sports writer.

The Internet was a distant thought to Mandel when he graduated from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism in 1998. He turned down a job offer from a newspaper in Anderson, S.C. to cover Georgia and Clemson football, but he caught a lucky break on his road as a Web reporter. An internship with ESPN the Magazine in 1998 led to an offer from parent company ABC, which was looking for writers to cover the new Bowl Championship Series on a college sports Web site.

“We basically all turned ourselves into national college football writers,” Mandel said about the under-publicized site. “I was being a national college football writer when I really hadn’t earned it yet.”

That experience led to his next move as a producer and writer for a relatively new CNNSI.com in 1999. Things just clicked, and he stayed on the national sports scene. He has called SI.com home ever since, introducing the mailbag in 2003 and the “College Football Overtime” column this season as a way to spice up his weekend reporting.

Completing his first book “Bowls, Polls and Tattered Souls” in 2007 and covering college football for 10 years straight led to what Mandel described as burnout. The Cincinnati native said he worried about asking for a five-month break to recharge his batteries after college football’s signing day in February 2009. “The industry is going bad and people are losing their jobs, and here I am asking voluntarily to take time off,” he said. Even with the field in economic turmoil, he received his wish.

So Mandel stepped away from his office adorned with Xavier memorabilia and blown up SI magazine covers featuring Heisman Trophy winners Troy Smith and Reggie Bush, for trips to Italy and Las Vegas. He kept writing, just not about football or basketball. Mandel kept a blog during his break and posted humorous personal essays. In his football columns, he often mixes in humor to keep readers entertained. The essays focused on his love of satire to a greater degree, but Mandel found it to be more of a challenge than trying to interview a 240-pound linebacker.

Mandel, who has a stalky but healthy frame, a tuft of dark hair and eyes that squint either from being tired or staring at a computer screen, wrote about everyday topics such as waiting in line at the Verizon store, being a non-drinker and receiving surgery for one of his testicles.

“It’s one thing to say you’re going to write a personal essay, you have to really commit to it” Mandel said about dealing with his surgery story so publically. “The more revealing you are the more the readers are going to connect to it. You can’t just half-ass it.”

Back from his sabbatical, refreshed, Mandel said he hopes to avoid the clichés in sports. His travel schedule is about half what it was in previous seasons with other SI writers taking off some of his burden. This allows him time to write more original enterprise stories, like a recent piece about the impact Twitter and Youtube are having on college sports.

A few minutes later the interview comes to a screeching halt for breaking news. Florida’s Urban Meyer was fined $30,000 by the South Eastern Conference for comments he made about officials. That should be a sweet tweet for Mandel’s 6,700 followers.

“It’s pretty amazing how Twitter has become,” he said after squeezing an abbreviated story into 140 characters. “This has become a primary source for news, both for consumers and writers.”

It’s just another step on his journey as a writer for the Web. Though he rarely writes for the actual print magazine that he read as a youth, Mandel seems content to keep supplying his wit and opinions to college sports fans online in whatever form they prefer.

More Midterm Help!

First, thanks to everybody who provided me with some helpful comments about the first half of my revised midterm. I realize you didn't have to take time to provide your feedback, so it is greatly appreciated. 

Here is the second half of my paper. It concerns two other works. The first is a non-fiction book called Random Family, which is about the almost miserable life of growing up in the South Bronx. The second is about a short story called Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell. As before, this isn't a strict academic paper. That's why I write in the first person throughout. I was asked by my professor to be more informal and almost write the second draft as a personal essay or letter. If you are confused, read the first part of the midterm here.

Here is the second half of the paper. Let me know what you think. And if you are tired of reading this, I plan on posting a profile I did on Sports Illustrated's Stewart Mandel later this weekend. Plus I have some other things in mind. If I had a good camera (hint to Christmas shoppers) I would post more of my own photos and stuff. Here we go ....

One word, hopeless, describes how I feel when reading Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family. LeBlanc follows the lives of several individuals living in the Tremont Avenue area of the Bronx over a decade. After hearing LeBlanc describe the reporting in person, I have a new respect for the amount work she put into this great non-fiction piece. It becomes quite clear that the main characters, Coco and Jessica, lack a great amount of ambition in life. They date drug dealers, become pregnant often, and take abuse from many different people. Unlike the first two pieces I mentioned, it is difficult for me to identify with these characters. But I am sure many who have never lived in their circumstances would have difficulty seeing themselves in these characters. With a look at the characters in Random Family, LeBlanc implies that they often had hope that often escaped them.

           

In a way, every child between Jessica and Coco is like a seed in a flower pot with potential to grow. Jessica and Coco, both young women, each have five children during the decade that LeBlanc reports on the individuals. Each child is showered with love and loyalty when they enter the world. Much of this may be because each child has the potential of one day freeing themselves from the South Bronx. Even Jessica’s mother, Lourdes, hopes her daughter’s first child, Serena, would be something more than her own kids were: “For Lourdes, Little Star’s arrival was like new love, or the coming of spring. … Little Star would love her grandmother with the unquestioning loyalty Lourdes felt she deserved but didn’t get from her ungrateful kids.” However, each new child grows, and either through impatient parenting or tough situations, the hope for something better faded. Coco cannot keep her girls in school after moving upstate with her children. She stifles her children’s progress, continuing the cycle of hopelessness that I mentioned. When Coco sends her older daughters, Mercedes and Nikki, to a summer camp to provide structure, she quickly pulls them back to their more familiar culture when she picks them up from camp. I cringed while reading how she changes the girls out of their summer camp attire and does not believe they could have possibly changed in a few weeks. The children are the future, but they are not given the proper circumstances to achieve much.

The characters in Random Family often have noble intentions but cannot follow through. Jessica and her brother Cesar would love to get years taken off their prison terms, but they either have trouble completing prison programs or get into fights. Coco decided to go back to school to get her GED in hopes it would help her get a decent paying job with some initial success: “Now she was headed for a career. She would work in medical records until she could learn photography. . . . Coco scored a perfect grade on her second test. Cesar’s letters would no longer intimidate her with big words she could not pronounce” (LeBlanc 298). But as LeBlanc put it, the Bronx was not done with Coco. Her home often filled with a variety of unsavory characters. She decided she must take care of her kids, so she later has to give up school again. Even though it was difficult to like the characters in Random Family, it is hard not to feel for the circle of hopelessness they live with. If anything, reading this gave me more hope because I don’t face the difficult circumstances of poverty, a drug culture, or lack of education. My family and friends also serve as a firm base of support for anything I attempt to do in life. That is something that is rarely found in Random Family.

Some of the pieces I have read do a wonderful job of showing how everyday people often cope with events not going their way. Many characters in Joseph Mitchell’s works materialize out of the Fulton Fish Market. One such character, Louis Morino from Up in the Old Hotel, is the owner of the restaurant Sloppy Louie’s. This is an establishment Mitchell himself went to almost daily. Louis spent most of his life serving others by working in restaurants and eventually establishing his own place. There is very little for him to look forward to after owning Sloppy Louie’s for more than two decades. There is one thing that he ponders about once a year, however – what the boarded up floors above his restaurant actually contain as he has never been up there. I love how Mitchell sets up this contemplation for Louis. By making the upper reaches of the hotel a mystery for Louis, it is also a mystery for the reader. One hopes that there is something especially interesting up in the hotel floors.

It is not for certain what Louis expects to find in the upper floors of his rented building that was once a hotel. It could be fish boxes or just old hotel junk, but he wants to find out: “If I could get upstairs just once in that damned old elevator and scratch around in those hotel registers . . . it might be possible I’d find out a whole lot more.” It is as if Louis expects to find something about himself, and I found myself rooting for him. 

Louis finally gets a companion, Mitchell, to go up in the rickety elevator of the old hotel building and act on his optimism. Unfortunately, the two’s excursion into the higher reaches of the old hotel symbolize an anti-climax to Louis’ life. The only things remaining in the upper rooms are dusty mirrors and furniture. Drawers sit empty with nothing of interest. However, Louis stubbornly looks through all the desk drawers only to find rusty paper clips. The only interesting items they find are religious placards about “The Wages of Sin and Death.” Mitchell and Louis do not even attempt going to the next couple floors. Louis says, “’Sin, death, dust, old empty rooms, old empty whiskey bottles, old empty bureau drawers. Come on, pull the rope faster! Pull it faster! Let’s get out of this.’” There is mortality to Louis not finding anything at the end of this short story. At a later stage of life with little to look forward to, he at least wants something exciting to happen with his journey, but his hope is quickly squashed. To me this shows how everybody has a great obsession in life. It could be for wealth, happiness, or a journey for something new. We all hope that things will work out for the better, but many times we have to face reality that life has different plans.

The themes of hope described in Random Family, Here is New York, Up in the Old Hotel, and Goodbye to All That are just a sampling of the stories that are available in the city. I learned that I am not alone by reading these works. The ambitious quest is an ideal that has been true to New York for decades. It is not something that belongs only to me. Everyone tends to believe that New York will just hand them this grand opportunity. These stories prove that hope can be a powerful force in New York City, but I learned through them that you often have to be strong enough to deal with things if they do not work out here.

 

Want to help me with a paper? All you have to do is read and comment.

Hey everybody! Back to the blog, and I hope you are enjoying it and not just ignoring the links I post on Facebook. I feel like I have to explain the following post. By reading, you are helping me revise a midterm paper. Exciting, right!?! I turned in a basic essay concerning the common theme of hope and dreams of New Yorkers for my "Storied New York" reading seminar. The professor seemed to like the idea of the paper. However, he has challenged me to make some wholesale revisions. I wrote the original more as an academic paper because I thought that's what was wanted. My professor, writer Suketu Mehta, asked that I write the revised paper due by the end of the semester in a personal essay style while tracing my theme through a few selected works. I figured I could post most of my essay on the blog since it is personal and in a way lets you know how I'm doing and what is going on in my head. Feel free to let me know if a part drags or doesn't make sense. Also. I was told to be more economic with my sentence structure (I.E. be more precise). So if you spot anything too wordy, let me know.  

 Hope in New York City Writing

I came to New York three months ago brand new to the city. I consider myself a prototypical transplant of somebody moving from a Midwest town of less than 2,000 people trying to find excitement in the “big city.” Un-jaded eyes allow me to see what is great about New York. They are still fresh and open to seeing what is possible compared to others.


My mind stays open, as well. When first leaving for New York all I could tell people is how many opportunities I should stumble across as a hopeful writer in the media capital of the world. Something about the uniqueness of New York compared to just about any other American city leads one to believe it somehow invigorates a creative mind.  I still have hope that New York has whatever I am looking for. The thought that things do not just magically happen in New York is slowly donning on me, though. This new idea came to me from tracing the theme of hope, dreams, and ambition in a seminar reading class about New York City. Many writers extol New York for the opportunity it provides. However, other works I read tell me not every dream comes true here.

Writer E.B. White and his short piece Here is New York signals a great example of what I am talking about. White states early in the piece that a good amount of New York’s 8 million residents arrived in the city as strangers seeking a type of “grail” just like I am.  The city’s grandness and privacy pull people to New York from their far away neighborhoods as they attempt to find their hope and spirit: “Many people who have no real independence of spirit depend on the city’s tremendous variety and sources of excitement for spiritual sustenance and maintenance of morale. In the country there are few chances of sudden rejuvenation – a shift in weather, perhaps, or something arriving in the mail. But in New York the chances are endless." This section of Here is New York speaks to me because it matches my story. Just like the people he mentions from the summer of 1948, I flocked to New York because it provides a rejuvenation that cities such as Chicago, Pittsburgh, or Washington D.C. could not offer.

White describes three distinctions of New Yorkers: those born in New York, those who commute, and those who come to the city in search of some quest. Obviously, I most identify with the newcomers. To a degree, White explains that the constant flow of new arrivals to New York gives the city its life and passion. White writes, “And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store or slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi . . . each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer." Though hope is not always fulfilled in life, people continue to come to New York with the possibility of being part of something greater. Reading Here is New York was as comfortable to me as eating my mom’s homemade meatloaf. It gave me the impression I am not alone in this giant metropolis.   

Greenwich Village Halloween Parade

Look who just can't wait to post another story. Because I am so versatile, here is a quick multimedia slideshow I put together about the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade in New York City. This was a fun event, but crazy. Hope you enjoy!

Following the New York City Marathon

I've decided I want to post some of my work from graduate reporting classes on this blog as a way for people to read and comment on anything I am up to. First up, my profile of Joy Haser, an extremely nice woman from Huntington who ran her first marathon ever in New York City last weekend. A little background on why I decided to profile Joy.

Everyone in my reporting class had to find a runner from our hometowns and do a profile of their race. Well, there was nobody from the Wheeling or Ohio Valley area in the race this year. However, I do consider Huntington a type of second home after graduating from Marshall University this spring. I found out Joy was running, contacted her through Facebook and went from there. Her family was extremely nice, and I was glad I could meet them and get a small dinner with them (thanks for picking up the tab on my pile of fries Nick!). Anyway, here is the story. Hopefully it can find publication in the Huntington Herald-Dispatch this weekend.

NEW YORK -- Running for Joy Haser began 11 years ago at Huntington High on an old treadmill that couldn’t go more than four miles per hour, and reaching the one-mile mark in about 15 minutes seemed impressive.

Since that first jog, Haser, 28, has accumulated more miles than she could have imagined. The Huntington native has run numerous 5Ks, 10Ks and half marathons in college and on her own, but the challenge of a 26.2 mile marathon has eluded her.

However, on Sunday Haser grasped her brass ring of running after finishing one of the most enjoyable and exhausting tasks by conquering 40th ING New York City Marathon.

Haser finished with a final time of 4:22:15, just shy of her goal of breaking four hours. Haser had several cramps and thigh pains throughout the race, but she said the experience of running New York for her first marathon was memorable from start to finish.

“From the very beginning it was just incredible walking around and hearing all the other languages that I didn’t recognize with runners from all over the world,” Haser said. “There were 40,000 people in one area at the start. It would be like if everybody in Huntington gathered to do a race.”

Joy Haser rode the wave of momentum through New York’s five boroughs with the help of more than a million random spectators and her own group of supporters. Joy’s husband, Nick Haser, and her parents Ed and Shelley Vincent made the nine-hour drive north with Joy but almost missed her during the race entirely.

They positioned themselves between mile markers 17 and 18 along First Avenue in Manhattan but grew concerned when it seemed that Joy was off her pace of nine miles per hour. When she turned off the Queensboro Bridge into Manhattan at 16 miles, Joy started to scan the crowd but neither she nor her family spotted each other.

It turned out Joy simply got lost in the sea of 43,000 participants in the field. When Nick found out through the course’s online electronic tracking system that Joy was past the 22-mile mark and headed toward Central Park, he made a beeline through the city and caught Joy just as she was about to finish.

“When there were people running by that I knew she was faster than I thought something was wrong,” Nick Haser said. “When I found out she was ahead of us my only thought was we got to catch her.”

Joy received motivation in other ways, however. When she removed her long-sleeve shirt in Brooklyn, hundreds of spectators began cheering her name, which was easy to figure out because she had “JOY” written on her arms in black marker.

“I was just amazed with how many people came out, and having all those spectators is really what gets you through the race,” Joy said.

Getting to the New York City Marathon was a challenge in itself for Joy. The first setback came when Nick, who ran the marathon in 2001 and planned to do it again this year, was injured early in training. He convinced Joy she should still run the race because the sights and crowd are hard to beat.

Then a little more than a week before the race, Joy injured her IT band, which is a common running injury of the thigh, while breaking in a new pair of Brooks running shoes on a 20-mile practice run. She was back to her old pair of purple and silver Asics for the marathon but still had pain early on in her legs and her feet.

A similar type of injury has kept her away from previous attempts at marathons in Nashville and Myrtle Beach. Joy said she loses flexibility in her knee on longer runs when her IT band flares up, so she was proactive leading up to the race by stretching, icing and taking ibuprofen.

Joy didn’t have to struggle to get to the finish line like she feared before the race. Instead the completion of her first marathon was the culmination many years of running.

Joy’s work ethic improved her running so much during her lone year of running at Huntington High that she received a partial scholarship to run for Covenant College, a small Christian liberal arts college in Lookout Mountain, Ga. After a year she transferred back home and enrolled at Marshall where she expected to join the cross-country team but started having her first set of running related injuries because of her training.

“I loved running so much that even during the offseason when other people would take time off I would train,” she said. “I hated racing but I loved training.”

Joy decided to just stick to running on her own as she completed her degree in recreation therapy in 2003.

Joy also ran to raise money for World Vision, a nonprofit humanitarian organization that supports children and families in more than 100 countries. Between Joy and Nick, they sponsor six children through World Vision from countries like India, Ethiopia and Bolivia. They both write letters to their sponsored children and send about $30 a month for financial support to each child. When she isn’t running, Joy works as an activity director at Woodlands Retirement Community in Huntington.

Nick still has eligibility to run in the New York Marathon in the future because of his injury, and now that Joy has completed her first full 26.2 mile race it is more reason to keep training together and hopefully race together.

“Now that I can train better, be more prepared and know what to expect,” Joy said, “I’m ready to come back and get my sub-four marathon.”