Good sports journalism these days is like a 1972 classic song title by Climax: “Precious and Few.”
Dead and gone are such shows as The Sports Reporters, Outside the Lines and Real Sports. Stephen A. Smith sold his journalist soul for big money to become a daily noise box. Clicks and likes have replaced long-form writing and reporting.
First and Pen is an independent Black-owned sports site. We regularly use excerpts from its work since we discovered Yussuf Khan, a sports and multicultural media veteran with over two decades of experience. His site is “fully committed to supporting and investing in underserved and overlooked communities, individuals, and voices of color,” says its mission statement.
“It’s been challenging in some ways because I funded it out of my own pocket. But I love it,” said Khan in a recent MSR phone interview. “I 100% own and operate First and Pen. I’m independent. I do not work with any big networks, and I do that purposely because I never want our voice and perspective to be diluted or dictated to.”
Khan started at ESPN, then CSTV (now CBS Sports Network), Interactive One (now Urban One, a Black-owned company), Big Lead Sports (now USA Today Sports Media Group), and The Shadow League, another Black-owned sports and culture multimedia company, all before he finally branched out on his own.
“When I started at ESPN in 1999, I was the only Black,” recalled Khan. “So, for four and a half years I was the only Black male in the television sales planning department, the only one out of about 30 people.
“That department teaches you how ESPN makes money … It really taught me that, when I can get into a position, to not just give back but to literally open doors and give [other Blacks] opportunities and options.”
This is why Khan annually holds his Get In The Game Conference for Black college students vying for future roles in sports media. It’s extensive and intentional with guest speakers and facilitators from various sports industry roles, he pointed out.
“We created the event to educate HBCU students and students of color about the sports business industry and the career pathways within it,” explained Khan, who also teaches sports management classes as an adjunct professor at three colleges and universities.
“One of the things I’ve always realized is that students want to get in the industry, but they don’t know how. They don’t know all the careers, they don’t know the skills, and even once they get in, they don’t know how to navigate throughout the industry and really build your career.
“There’s so many other things we do,” he continued. “You have to be multimedia — can’t just be writing or I want to be in sales. No, it’s much more than that.”
He reaches out not just to Black HBCU students but also their PWI counterparts, stressed Khan, “because many times they are in schools that have sports management programs or sports communications, but they’re in the same boat, right? They’re fighting twice as hard to get in these positions, and they don’t have the same access as a lot of the white students do.
“So, we wanted to create an event that is more educational than just informational,” said Khan of his conference, which he had put on for the past several years.
The veteran Black journalist agrees with us on the sad state of today’s sports media in which seemingly everyone has a podcast or uses social media ad nauseum, “not intelligent or thoughtful, just put it out there,” surmised Khan. “And I got tired of that.
“When I launched First and Pen, I wanted to give Black and brown writers a destination and a hub where they could talk about things that are important, that aren’t just dictated by word count,” concluded Khan. “They’re dictated by thought, by information and by inspiration as well.”
Charles Hallman welcomes reader comments to challman@spokesman-recorder.com.