Purple Press

If you tune in to ESPN most weekday mornings, you’ll see Get Up host Mike Greenberg in front of a framed Wildcats football jersey. Check back later to catch Michael Wilbon on Pardon the Interruption and you’ll spot a football helmet emblazoned with the Northwestern “N.”

Greenberg ’89 and Wilbon ’80 are two titans of the sports media world who are unapologetically proud of their purple roots.

Sometimes, though, their shared alma mater bleeds into their work. During the 2021–22 NBA season, Greenberg and Wilbon teamed up on ESPN’s NBA Countdown, offering pregame and halftime analysis for some of the league’s biggest matchups. But during their off-camera breaks, the Wildcats took priority. 

“On NBA nights, we’d sit on set and watch the Northwestern basketball games,” Greenberg confides. And that’s not new. Greenberg recalls the Wildcats’ thrilling run in the 2017 NCAA men’s basketball tournament, when he and Wilbon “held each other like small children watching those games.”

The two ESPN legends are part of a loud and proud network of Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications alumni in sports journalism. From coast to coast, you can find Medill grads on sidelines and in press boxes, breaking down the big plays in studio and digging beneath the surface to get the inside story.

They report, analyze, illustrate and contextualize. Their work exposes injustices, inspires change and unearths history. Some of them have more social media followers than the athletes they cover — Wilbon and Greenberg together have nearly 6 million Twitter followers.

We talked with several prominent and up-and-coming sports media stars about how serendipitous timing put them in the right place to do groundbreaking reporting — and how sports reporting helps us understand broader societal issues.

Sports Reflect Society

After her sophomore year at Northwestern, Christine Brennan returned to her hometown in summer 1978 to intern at The Toledo Blade city desk. She covered county fairs, wrote obituaries and reported heartwarming features. Between assignments, though, Brennan would venture back to the sports desk. “Those were my heroes,” she says, “so I’d sneak back and say hi.”

The next summer, The Blade asked her to intern with the sports section, making her the first woman to work full time in that department.

Brennan ’80, ’81 MS has gone on to become a bestselling author, award-winning sports columnist for USA Today and frequent CNN and ABC News commentator. Her canon of work provides a broad view of the last 40 years of sports history. But the term “stick to sports” isn’t part of her vocabulary, she says, because it’s such a narrow view of sports’ impact on the world. “Sports take us to important national conversations that we would not be having otherwise,” Brennan says. “Yes, we love sports. We live and die with sports. But the world of sports is so much more than fun and games.”

Even people who aren’t interested in professional golf couldn’t ignore the conversations that arose when Brennan started writing columns in 1999 that drew attention to Augusta National Golf Club’s archaic policy regarding women members. Her columns helped spur the club, home of the Masters Tournament, to finally admit women in 2012.

Her reporting has also revealed scandals at multiple Olympic Games. She notably broke the stories of the 2002 Winter Olympics scandal in Salt Lake City, where a judge from France was pressured to fix the results for pairs figure skating; the Russian judging scandal at the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia; and the Kamila Valieva doping scandal at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

Brennan’s ability to illustrate how sports are representative of social, cultural, economic and political issues comes in part from her time at Northwestern.

“There’s an old line about the sports section being the toy department at the paper. Well, it’s not the toy department anymore, and it hasn’t been for years,” says Brennan, who in 1981 became the first woman sports reporter at The Miami Herald. In 1985 she also became the first woman to cover the Washington, D.C., NFL team at The Washington Post, where she sat next to Michael Wilbon for 10 years.

“In my career, I’ve always looked at myself — from my first internships to my first days at The Miami Herald — as being a journalist who was covering sports, not necessarily as a sports journalist,” says Brennan, who is a professor of practice at Northwestern as well as a University trustee. “That comes from Medill.”

Kevin Blackistone ’81, Washington Post columnist and University of Maryland journalism professor of the practice, shares Brennan’s mentality. For Blackistone, reporting on issues of equity, racism, poverty and fair compensation go hand in hand with sports coverage.

Kevin Blackistone

Blackistone didn’t begin his career covering sports. He worked the city desk at The Boston Globe, then investigated social justice issues at The Chicago Reporter. By 1986 Blackistone had moved to The Dallas Morning News, where he covered business and the economy. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that he started writing a sports column in Dallas.

“Writing about race and social justice is the reason I’m in journalism,” says Blackistone. “So it’s through that lens that I generally look at every topic that I write about. It was also the one area that I knew I had gravitas in and knew would be newsworthy one way or another, because historically there were very few sports columnists who dealt with [race and social justice], despite the fact that those issues have been rampant in sports from day one.”

Blackistone recently served as a producer of Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting. The feature-length documentary, which premiered in 2022, focuses on the movement to eliminate the use of Native American slurs and names in logos, images and gestures that represent sports teams. “For journalists of color and women,” he adds, “if we don’t bring those perspectives to our journalism, then we’re really doing journalism a disservice.”