“We’re encouraging other students who don’t have credentials to cover events during the week, and there are many of those,” Laucella said. These events will be in the Super Bowl Village near Lucas Oil Stadium, which opens opens Jan. 27. On the schedule are parades, festivals, performances, exhibits and even a zipline between two tall downtown buildings.

Laucella said she is working with the NFL for additional access after Media Day to enable students to interview officials and organizers, but some stories won’t require anything but reporters’ curiosity and interviewing skills. For example, visitors and tourists, food vendors, local businesses or members of the Indianapolis committee who oversee the Super Bowl “experience” all have stories to tell.

One special event is open to all the students: a town hall-style meeting with veteran broadcaster Bob Costas is set for Thursday evening.

“The whole week offers great opportunities for any of our students as well as exposure for our program,” Laucella said. Student work will be featured on the NSJC website, for example, already one of the most-visited sports journalism websites in the country.

The center has sent students to many Indianapolis events, such as the Indianapolis 500, NCAA men’s and women’s basketball Final Fours, and Big Ten football championship game, where they worked as teams to generate stories, video and photos.

“We have so many opportunities in Indianapolis and often are able to include Bloomington students,” Laucella said. “We glad to be able to offer these experiences to all the students.”

King, who said he was honored by the appointment, joins an esteemed group of journalists already on the board of the nation’s most comprehensive sports media program, including ESPN the Magazine Editor-in-Chief Chad Millman, FOX broadcaster Joe Buck, CBS’s Dick Enberg, legendary Washington Post scribe Dave Kindred, ESPN vice president Vince Doria, Tim Franklin, the program’s founding director, and several more.

In many ways, King’s story mirrors that of his employer, from his humble beginnings as a general assignments reporter at the tiny Commercial-News in Danville, Ill. to his current role as one of the top decision-makers at the biggest print and digital enterprise in the sports media landscape. King is now responsible for supervision of all content at ESPN and the company’s overall editorial direction. He oversees an award-winning team of more than 400 editors, writers and designers across the behemoth that is ESPN.com, a website that typically generates around 40 million unique visitors a month.

Prior to joining ESPN, King spent 14 years working this way through the newspaper ranks. From 1997 to 2004, he held a host of positions at the Philadelphia Inquirer, serving as graphic artist, deputy sports editor, assistant managing editor and deputy managing editor.  Prior to that, King worked at the Louisville Courier-Journal as a graphic artist, director of photography and presentation editor.  From 1987 through 1992, he worked at the Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, N.J., a major suburban Philadelphia paper.  In his first job with the Commercial-News, King worked as a general assignment reporter and graphic artist.

Board members like King lend their expertise to NSJC students on a regular basis. Their involvement has has helped NSJC provide students and working professionals with an unprecedented array of education and career development tools. Other board members participate in speaking events on the Indianapolis and Bloomington campuses and facilitate internships with their organizations.

King spoke with NSJC graduate students most recently in October, offering candid thoughts on his employer, the changing sports media business and host of other topics.

Billy Corben, director of The U—an unfiltered look at the raucous, and supremely talented, University of Miami football program in the 1980’s—and Thaddeus Matula, who delved into the decades-old pay-for-play scandal at SMU in Pony Excess, discussed their respective movies and the documentary filmmaking process as a whole.  For Corben, crafting a successful documentary is quite simple: “Find a good story and don’t screw it up,” he said.

Both were colorful—and oftentimes off-color—as they walked students through the difficulties and joys inherent in crafting a documentary. Corben claims it wasn’t difficult to entice former Miami players to discuss their exploits on and off the field, while Matula claims several SMU stars of yesteryear, including Eric Dickerson, were hesitant to talk on camera. “If you want to be a filmmaker, it requires the ability to hear no and keep going,” Matula said. “It’s all about hearing ‘no, no, no, no,’ and you say, ‘yes, I’m still going to do it.’”

Corben and Matula are Miami and SMU alumni, respectively, and were thrilled to find that their movies, though tough on the schools, have bolstered football recruiting. A freshman receiver at SMU even told Matula that he opted to play for the Mustangs because he’d seen Pony Excess. The SMU coaching staff went as far as to award Matula a championship ring following the team’s win the in the 2009 Hawaii Bowl.

Miami’s former head coach, Randy Shannon, and current coach, Al Golden, have both gone out of their way to inform Corben of the positive effect his film has had on recruiting. “I wanted to movie to serve as one of those monuments they never built for the team while still being objective and unapologetic,” he says.

The event was a sponsored through a partnership between the Sport Management, Marketing and Communication program, the Department of Kinesiology, the School of Journalism, the Department of Communication and Culture, the IU Sport Marketing Alliance and the IU Sport Communication Club.

The editors — all IU alumni — warned that working for a magazine isn’t as glamorous as many imagine. “Right now it’s tough going in this industry,” said Chandra Turner, executive editor of Parents magazine. “[When I was coming out of school], I wish I would’ve known how much the industry would change in the next 15 years.”

Turner was joined on the panel by Chad Millman, editor-in-chief of ESPN The Magazine, Christine Griffin, digital director of Fitness and Colin Kearns, senior editor at Field & Stream. The panel was part of the School of Journalism’s Speaker Series, which is open to students, faculty, staff and area residents.

Each rose to prominence through a mix of talent and risk-taking. Griffin, for instance, moved to New York with no job in hand in hopes of networking her way into a full-time position. Despite interning at Sports Illustrated during the summer before his senior year, Millman, too, moved to New York armed only with a diploma and no guarantees.

For each, though, the risk paid off, as Millman returned to Sports Illustrated and Griffin parlayed freelance work into a full-time position at Cosmo Girl magazine. Though both found success, neither knows if they’d have the stomach to take such a daunting risk again. Still, the panelists encouraged each student to take a leap of faith if working for a magazine is a career goal. “You have to go where the jobs are, because that’s where the jobs are,” Millman quipped.

The editors offered advice for applying to jobs for those undaunted by the prospect of diving headlong into a job market laden with hiring freezes. Each sees countless cover letters and résumés every month and can quickly identify who stands out and who hasn’t put in the necessary effort.

“You need to write a tailored cover letter,” Turner said. “Write more about the publication. It needs to be authentic and needs to show you get it—don’t be generic.”

Though the industry has been rocked by layoffs and uncertainty in recent years, the editors maintain their jobs are still satisfying and fun, thanks to the myriad challenges they overcome daily.

“I love my job,” Millman says. “For me, when you’re putting a magazine together, you never know if it’s going to work. You plan these things weeks and months in advance, you come up with these grandiose schemes and great story ideas and fantastic photos. It’s a crapshoot, and you have no idea if the decision you made in June will come to fruition in August. What I like is the exact moment when I figure out it’s going to work out. I like it when the decisions you make are great ones and it leads to a great magazine.”

“I had been such a fan of them growing up,” he says now. “They looked so fun and glamorous. They were so shiny and sheik. And living in New York seemed like the place to be.”

But his dad, who helped him move into his first apartment, apparently wasn’t yet sold. Before leaving, he handed his son a bartending manual and offered a bit of wishful thinking. “I hope you don’t need it,” he said.

Three weeks later, just as Millman was about to crack open the book, the phone rang. Sports Illustrated was on the other line with a job offer.

Eighteen years later, his dicey gamble to move to the magazine capital of the world has paid off ten-fold. On Tuesday with graduate students of Indiana University’s National Sports Journalism Center, Millman, now the editor-in-chief of ESPN The Magazine, offered insights into the journey that has seen him ascend from a scribe working for his college newspaper, The Indiana Daily Student, to one of the more venerable positions of the media juggernaut that is ESPN.

In his near-20 year career in the magazine industry, what’s the one prevailing lesson about his future profession he wished he had known coming out of IU?

“It’s hard, it’s really hard,” he says succinctly. “It’s grunt work and it’s hard. I wish I had been told how hard it was so I could have been better prepared.”

Millman’s absurdly quick ascension – his first job out of college was at Sports Illustrated, after all – underscores the bevy of talents he brings to the table as a journalist. He’s an author of six books on a wide range of subjects. He essentially, he says, shaped a beat at ESPN that hadn’t been previously pursued: the enigmatic world of sports gambling. Editor-in-chief since June, he maintains a gambling-centric blog and a Behind the Bets video series.

Perhaps most telling of all: he boasts more than 28,000 followers on Twitter.

“I love my job,” he says. “For me, when you’re putting a magazine together, you never know if it’s going to work. You plan these things weeks and months in advance, you come up with these grandiose schemes and great story ideas and fantastic photos. It’s a crapshoot, and you have no idea if the decision you made in June will come to fruition in August. What I like is the exact moment when I figure out it’s going to work out. I like it when the decisions you make are great ones and it leads to a great magazine.”

To little surprise, a prominent role at the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports comes with a fair amount of controversy. Partly due to the massive spectrum ESPN operates in, there are hoards of criticisms, both based and otherwise. In the gamut of the magazine, Millman says his unit has caught fire on a number of topics, from the publication’s Boston-themed October issue to the ever-debated What if Michael Vick Were White images to the magazine’s oversized pages.

“The biggest complaint we get is that size is too big,” he explains. “They hate the themes. Those who criticize are a very vocal minority.”

There’s also the circulating notion that his employer – business partners with a wide array of college conferences and professional sports leagues – is having trouble maintaining its journalistic integrity. A recent USA Today headline begged the question: “Is ESPN the force behind realignment?”

“There is the perception that ESPN is soft,” Millman says. “And we’re always going to be battling that perception. The perceived notion will never go away. But there’s never been an instance where we at the magazine haven’t been able to pursue a story we want to pursue because of that.”

The bottom line: Millman’s staff of roughly 100 writers, reporters, editors and designers continue to churn out the nation’s second-most widely read sports periodical in the country (circulation: roughly two million). They’ve established a progressive mantra that spills across their pages; as Millman will tell you, ESPN The Magazine is always thinking ahead, never behind. Their eye-popping photographs and appending graphics compliment the work of their award-winning writers.

The thinking, according to Millman: “What are you going to read now that is going to make you a smarter sports fan tomorrow?”

All of which likely serves him well at ESPN, for which he left his post at The Philadelphia Inquirer for in 2004. In his seven years in Bristol, he’s run an award-winning outfit of more than 200 editors, writers and designers across the online platform, overseen the launch of five regional sites as well as columnist Bill Simmons’ brainchild, Grantland.com. And the duties don’t end there: he’ll now have more of an active role in the production of ESPN: The Magazine, further establishing King as one of the instrumental components behind the company’s rapid rise to the apex of the sports media world.

King openly offered his thoughts on his employer, the changing sports media business and a host of other topics Thursday for graduate students of the National Sports Journalism Center. He spoke of how Internet news coverage has evolved during his time at ESPN, how he and his colleagues are working to better engage their audience before, during and after an event and lastly, what it’s like running the brand all other companies are chasing.

“We have a strategy that we call live, social, personal,” King explained to the students via Skype. “It’s a mantra that we’re spreading around everywhere. There was a time when a website was enough, but now, we want to be there with you. We want to send tweets while the game is going on. We want to make sure (that) as an audience, you are getting what you want out of this relationship. We want to create an environment you always want to come back to.”

King also expounded on six trends he sees shaping the ever-evolving world of sports media, among them: the fading existence of the 800-1,000 word online story.

King was happy to respond to a multitude of questions from the students centered on ESPN, journalistic integrity and the booming online media market:

• On the five regional websites in Los Angeles, Dallas, New York, Chicago and Boston:

“They’ve all done very well financially against our plan and we’re happy with what we’ve created. In the long haul, we want to see bigger growth. Originally, we did draw up a plan to go to 25 markets. Now, we’re looking in both directions. How can we be great locally and how can that help us be great nationally?”

• On the recent departure of popular ESPN.com columnist Pat Forde to Yahoo! Sports:

“First of all, I’d like to say I’ve known Pat since 1992 and he’s a very, very good friend of mine. I think in our latest contract conversation, we suggested he do more things with the magazine, tell bigger stories that way. It wasn’t the offer Pat wanted. Yahoo! must have simply fit his eye better.”

• On ESPN’s recently-questioned objectivity, pertaining to journalism ethics:

“That’s an issue we take very seriously. We have to take an active role in dispelling the notion that our journalists are kept from doing good journalism based on our business interests. Nobody loves Goliath. Whatever reporting we do – as good as possible, impactful – if we get it wrong, it would be that much bigger.”

“The middle is disappearing,” he said. “There are two very different sports consumption experiences. First, there’s the quick stuff: the short highlights, the data, the stats, the tweets, the breaking news. Consumers are diving in and diving out as much as they possible can. The other experience is the long-form, deep engagement experience. (People are) very comfortable reading long-form stories, and those with tablets know.”

King, a good friend of Simmons, noted the rise of Grantland.com as a prime example. The website is a branch of ESPN.com that offers lengthy features and commentary pieces on topics in sports and pop culture.

“The site’s been up for about four months now,” King said. “The first month is got seven million unique visitors. The second month it got 8.5 million. The third month, around 10 million. On any given day, 15-20 percent of people stay between 15 minutes and an hour. In the digital space, that is an eternity. This shows us that the longer, immersive experiences are meaningful.”

Given Simmons’ vast popularity across the Internet, Grantland’s success comes as little surprise. But it also alludes to a second point emphasized by King: the shrinking gap between professional sports journalist and the stay-at-home blogger. What Simmons represents – the quintessential sports fan, living and dying with his beloved teams and offering emotional, candid and amusing accounts along the way – is evidence of a fluctuating market for sports coverage.

“There is no mass audience anymore,” King said. “There is a massive audience of individuals instead. They are all so diverse in (their) interests. Now, technology has allowed you to start off every day by creating a world of your own. You follow the people you want to follow.”

In all likelihood, Donald Fehr has strolled out of as many painstaking labor negotiations as any figure in sports. When you run the Major League Baseball Players Association for 26 years – through a players’ strike that cost the league an entire season and a World Series, through negotiations that led to five separate labor contracts, through the shadow of performance-enhancing drugs that continues to hover over the game – it comes with the territory.

So, too, does the throng of reporters that anxiously await Fehr and friends’ exit from these types of bargaining meetings. They stand with recorders and cameras eager for the day’s news, eager for a winner and a loser.

And that is, according to Fehr, just where the problem starts.

“The coverage of these bargaining sessions is not very good,” he said. “Really, all they want to ask is, ‘What was the score today?’ And that’s really got nothing to do with it. It’s not a game.”

Friday, Fehr spoke at Indiana University with graduate students of the National Sports Journalism Center and candidly offered his take on a myriad of topics, from his 30-plus years involved with Major League Baseball to his new gig with the National Hockey League to the long-standing criticisms he holds with the media contingent with which he often deals.

When asked about the coverage of last summer’s NFL lockout, Fehr characterized it as “uninformed and often silly. Most of the time, it seemed like gossip pieces.”

Sports reporters, Fehr explained, are conditioned through years of press box gazing to seek out the black-and-white angle in their coverage, and in many instances, that means day’s winner and the day’s loser.

“The Greek tragedy of sports is something that has an enormous audience,” he offered. “There’s always a hero and there’s always a goat. It’s a zero sum game.”

But what Fehr urged the journalists to consider was a broader perspective. That, he hopes, will help widen the coverage to further center on the underlying issues at stake, their potential lasting effects and the business side of professional sports leagues that is so often ignored.

“I think it depends on what you want to cover and what your customers want to watch or read,” he said. “But you should be pursuing what the nature of the issues are and the proposals that are being discussed. Why do they matter? What’s the impact of this result or that result, and what is the public interest from fans as a result of what happens here?”

Fehr has spent his career representing players’ interests against overpowering owners and he deals with an ever-changing media delegation through all of it. As he warms into his new role backing the NHL players before their current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires next September, his perspective on the relationship between labor negotiations and the sports media remains both unique and relevant.

“I believe there are three ways to cover sports: first, there’s the athletic competition,” he said. “There’s the celebrity angle, because it seems that we latch on to anyone who has a high income. And thirdly is the business side, which is hardly understood these days. From my standpoint, I’d prefer (professional) sports be covered as businesses rather than games on the field. But I know that’s an argument I’m going to lose.”

Donald Fehr was back in Bloomington, Ind. Friday as one of four recipients of Indiana University’s College of Arts and Science’s 2011 Distinguished Alumni Award. There, he met with graduate students of the school’s National Sports Journalism Center and offered insights on his professional career, one that has seen him serve as the executive director of the MLBPA from 1986-2009 and the National Hockey League Players Association since late 2010.

“I sort of got into hockey by accident,” Fehr told the students. “(They) had all kinds of internal problems, and I was asked to put the organization back together and rewrite their constitution. I did that and put a staff together on a volunteer basis. I really ended up liking the people and the players. It’s different (from baseball). The industries have fundamental differences and there is a learning curve.”

From his 33 years working with the MLBPA, Fehr’s fingerprints remain all over professional baseball. When he took over back in 1985, the league’s average salary was a meager $289,000. Today, it stands at $2.9 million. He’s headed negotiations for five separate labor contracts, all the while fending off management’s repeated attempts to obtain a salary cap.

“I was happy with the fact that it was one of the few jobs that you can ever have where your constituents basically say, ‘We want you to do what you think is the right thing to do. And as long as you can persuade us that it is the right thing to do, then we’ll back you and we’ll fund you.’ That’s a really nice luxury to have and I had it for a long, long time.”

The next major project Fehr will tackle comes next fall, when the NHL’s current collective bargaining agreement expires. He expects negotiations to begin sometime after the All-Star Game, which takes place Jan. 29 in Ottawa, Canada.

“You have to prepare your membership for bargaining,” he said when asked how he prepares for labor negotiations. “You have to realize what things you can negotiate on, what kinds of things you can’t negotiate. You have to decide what is really important to you. How has the current agreement worked across the board? What has been good, what has been bad? What really matters to the players? What will the owners be interested in asking for?”

Fehr is the latest in a noteworthy list of journalists, media members and prominent figures in the sports world that have taken time to speak with NSJC students. Students also talked with New York Times correspondent Don Van Natta, Jr. on his new book Wonder Girl and Seattle Times investigative reporter Ken Armstrong on his book, Scoreboard, Baby.

Along with co-author Nick Perry, The Seattle Times investigative journalist originally pieced together an award-winning four-part series for the newspaper in 2008 on the myriad of off-the-field issues that trailed several players on the University of Washington’s 2000 football team. Nonetheless, the squad, behind the talents of future NFL players Jerramy Stevens and Marquis Tuiasosopo and the guidance of carefree coach Rick Neuheisel, won 11 games and the program’s first Rose Bowl in nine years.

But throughout the magical season – largely unbeknownst to the university’s fans, supporters and even the sportswriters that covered the team – a slew of Huskies were engulfed in rampant criminal behavior that included allegations of rape, armed robbery and domestic abuse. Armstrong and Perry, through tireless reporting that involved 97 different public records requests and scores of interviews, artfully tell of the underreported storylines that hovered around the team: the continued leniency offered by the local judicial system toward star athletes, the forgotten perspectives of those they hurt and a culture that tolerated, if not ignored, such activity. But, most troubling of all, Scoreboard, Baby paints a disturbing yet familiar picture: in today’s big-time world of collegiate athletics, it’s winning, above all else, that matters most.

“This is a morality tale,” Armstrong said via Skype when asked what he wanted readers to take away from the book. “Your hope is that people will take away lessons that are learned and that they make better decisions going forward. You hope people read the story and become more aware of the people that are being hurt in the shadows while we are all celebrating in the stands.”

At their reporting outset, Armstrong and Perry placed all 107 players from that 2000 Husky team on a spreadsheet and rounded up relevant data: their majors, if they graduated, if they had any criminal history, who their legal defense was and what, if any, punishment they received. In all, the original series took 11 months to complete. When it was finished, the pair still felt they could go further.

“We were like a Hoover, vacuuming up everything we could get,” he said of the reportage. “And we left very disappointed in some instances. We were very troubled when judges seem to be more eager to talk about football (with a defendant) than the allegations. To me, that was pretty telling.”

The authors hold little back in their account of the Huskies’ 2000 season, evenly hurling blame on the courts, the school, the athletic department, the coaches, the players, the fans and, perhaps most startling, the media. The Seattle Times, Armstrong and Perry’s current employer, was no exception.

“That was one of the most difficult aspects of the reporting process, having a level of criticism towards our own newspaper,” Armstrong said. “It was very difficult to not come off as self-righteous, but if we didn’t include this, we would really be disingenuous. The media is often part of the problem.”

Armstrong concluded the session by telling the students he believes journalists are more conscientious about stories similar to Washington’s, a point further validated when you consider the abundance of scandals that have rocked college sports over the past few years.

“As a reporter, you have an obligation to your audience to cover issues of public interest,” he said. “People care about these stories. People read them. These stories can make a difference. They matter.”

Via Skype, Van Natta, who currently reports from The New York Times’s Miami bureau, walked students through the tedious process of constructing a vibrant and accurate depiction of one of America’s greatest athletes. He spent the better part of a decade digging through Zaharias’s letters, journal entries, as well as oral histories and stacks of newspaper and magazine articles, to assemble the book. “It was a labor of love,” Van Natta told the students.

Van Natta claims that the research, coupled with interviews of the few Zaharias contemporaries still alive today, allowed him to attain a full sense of his protagonist. Though he came to know Babe, he claims he avoided falling for her the way that many biographers do with their subjects, as his top priority was to paint an accurate portrait, not necessarily a flattering one. He found that Zaharias was an unabashed self-promoter and routinely fabricated events so that the media would portray her in a more favorable light.

While Van Natta came to know Zaharias’s flaws all too well, he maintains that he deeply admires her myriad athletic accomplishments. She was an All-American basketball player, an Olympic gold medalist and won dozens of professional and amateur golf events, among countless other athletic exploits.

Beyond discussing Wonder Girl, Van Natta, also the author of First Off the Tee and Her Way, imparted some valuable writing advice to the students. He encouraged them to write everyday, even if it’s only for a small audience of friends and family on a blog. The best writers, he said, rely on details to bring their stories to life. He told the students that this is not only true in fiction, but in non-fiction and journalistic endeavors, where dogged research and reporting can unearth details—the difference in Zaharias’s and her golfing opponent’s manner of dress, for instance—which will engage readers and elevate the work.