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“I was never a good student growing up,” says Fred Katz, NBA writer for FOXSports.com. “If there was a basketball game on, I wanted to watch that instead of doing homework, and at some point, I just thought, I have to do a job where my job is to watch the game.”
He did exactly that, heading off the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he received his degree in Broadcast Journalism, took on jobs involving everything from radio to TV to blogging about sports, landed a position as a Featured Columnist for the Bleacher Report, and finally ended up at FOX, where he’s been for over a year.
“When people hear about my job, they say, ‘Oh, that’s my dream job,’ but they don’t realize how much goes into it,” Fred explains. “You have to really love the content: it’s not something you can just like and get away with it.” He doesn’t hold back about the demands of the role: the 70-80 hour weeks, the non-stop influx of information to cover, that time when the Phoenix Suns coach, Jeff Hornacek, was fired, and Fred got called into work at 3 am. “The news doesn’t stop,” he says.
But Fred does have a pretty sick job, and he knows how to handle the nonstop news by keeping his finger on the pulse. “I’m a Twitter addict. It’s an efficient way to produce and receive information.” He also lives for the stories, describing his two favorite articles: a piece where he watched a nail-biting game with the family of potential Rookie of the Year, Karl-Anthony Towns of the Minnesota Timberwolves, and a story about Reggie Evans of the Sacramento Kings, who went from selling crack at 17-years-old to using his NBA earnings to support his hometown through his charity, The Reggie Evans Foundation.
Fred’s advice to college students who want to pursue this career? There’s no such thing as writer’s block. “As a professional, that just means you don’t know enough, you haven’t done your research. When you’re writing about a topic you have to be as close to an expert as possible. You have to read a ton.” Fred’s inspiration came from Bill Simmons, a famous sports columnist whose long form of about 5,000 words took Fred, a slow reader, around 40 minutes to get through – but it was worth it. “You start to develop your own voice, your own tactics, and you’re not doing an impression anymore,” Fred says.
Spots are filling up quickly, and this opportunity will close soon. If you want to win a chance to get one-on-one career advice from Fred Katz, apply here.
