Playing into a Career Niche

By Kelly Carr
June 25, 2008 06:41 PM

When listeners tuned into Darren Rovell’s radio show, “the Sports Business Beat,” most had no idea he was still a junior at Northwestern University. He landed interviews with high-ranking sports business executives and covered the industry with the ease of a veteran, not someone under 21.

Now at age 29, as a sports business reporter for CNBC, Rovell has interviewed some of the biggest names in the sports biz such as Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and Boston Red Sox owner John Henry. He recently reported and anchored a primetime documentary on Nike, which led him overseas to report on the company’s factories in Vietnam. And he religiously updates his blog, “Sports Biz,” where the money trail behind the game is evident in every post.

Before joining CNBC, Rovell spent six years as a business sports reporter for ESPN. And he’s already written two books, “First in Thirst: How Gatorade Turned the Science of Sweat into a Cultural Phenomenon” and “On the Ball: What You Can Learn About Business from America’s Sports Leaders.”

How did he do it? He found an area that many reporters failed to look at. Most sports media, Rovell realized early on, focused on interviewing famous athletes.

So he took another path, owning the business angle of sports and crafting himself into a nationally recognized expert. The rest, which most reporters would call a “dream career,” just fell into place.

“At the end of high school someone told me, ‘if you go into business journalism there are fewer people in it and you could advance yourself.’ That stuck in my head,” Rovell said. “My plan was to develop a niche of something that I could immediately teach myself to become an expert in…I didn’t invent the niche. I just brought it to the masses.”

To educate himself, Rovell spent hours in college reading any books he could find that touched on sports business journalism. The Sports Business Journal was his daily reading fix. He developed a specialized mindset, teaching himself to watch sports like almost no one else.

He freezes images to see what brand an athlete is wearing and dives into topics like how sponsors would be affected by Tiger Woods’ knee surgery.

“The first thing I had to get over was people who say fans aren’t interested in business reporting,” Rovell said. “I say that if they don’t understand all of the business, they can’t understand the game…I have my eye on everything. It’s a tremendous amount of work. It’s information overload.”

Rovell has covered unique and major breaking stories in the sports world, angles others ignored, so he’s accustomed to seeing his reporting picked up by other major media outlets. He followed unused Super Bowl shirts to Zambia and wrote about De Wayne Buice, a pitcher who never struck gold in the big leagues, but stumbled onto a fortune when he partnered in a card company called Upper Deck.

“Most of my readers are people who just want to take part in a different type of read on sports,” Rovell said. “It’s both people who are in the industry and the finance world. At the Super Bowl people are at media day talking to people to assess the game. I’m doing something else. I’m asking Tom Brady, ‘why do you turn down so many marketing deals?’”

If you’re interested in covering the business of sports, Rovell said the first step is to make yourself an expert. Start a blog. Subscribe to news feeds and alerts. Read what other reporters are covering. Scan your area; think about the sports business stories that exist locally in your stadiums and companies.  Find the money.

It’s the endless trail of cash that leads to in-depth, important stories. It’s what’s led Rovell to the most exciting stories of his career, ones that have made his legs tingle.

“I love the story. I love the chase,” Rovell said. I love the adrenaline right before you go on air to publish something and you know that 25 minutes later it will be on Sports Center. I haven’t lost the passion for breaking the story, and I don’t know if I ever will.”

 

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism