A Giant Task

For Emma Steinberg, the first game of the NFL’s preseason just can’t be beat. And when she landed a job as an associate producer for the San Francisco 49ers, she finally got a front-row seat to it all, creating video content for the team’s social media channels. 

“Seeing rookies on the field for their first NFL game was really special,” Steinberg ’21 says. “I remember seeing quarterback Brock Purdy nervous on the bench last year, having never entered an NFL game before, and now he’s a known name.”   

Growing up in the Bay Area, Steinberg bonded with her dad over all kinds of local sports teams. They watched the Warriors (“when no one watched the Warriors”), the San Francisco Giants and the 49ers — and Big Ten football.  

Steinberg played soccer and basketball and ran track, but after suffering an injury in high school, she pivoted to multimedia journalism to stay connected to the sports she loved. At Northwestern, she joined the Northwestern News Network’s SportsNight. 

After a journalism residency with Sports Illustrated and a role at the Big Ten Network, Steinberg joined the 49ers’ production crew in 2021 and traveled with the team to film pre- and postgame content, as well as in-game action and corporate partnership projects.  

In 2022 she won a Northern California Area Emmy Award for outstanding achievement for interview/discussion. “It’s a Q&A where kids interview the players about their favorite Thanksgiving traditions,” Steinberg says of the winning project. “I found it really fun that the audience got to see this softer side of the players.”  

In May Steinberg joined the San Francisco Giants as a digital content producer, filming highlights and cutting them in real time for social media. “I recorded the Giants’ 100th ‘splash hit,’ the team’s 100th home run into the San Francisco Bay,” she says.