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.