Tonight is another edition of the Sports Media Weekly podcast with Keith Thibault of Sports Media Journal and your humble blogger. Our guest is Andrew Catalon, sports anchor for WNYT-TV, Newschannel 13 in Albany, NY as well as freelancer for NBC Sports and CBS Sports. I’ll go into our segment with Andrew later, but as always, Keith and I did our usual news of the week segment.
We began discussing the rebranding of Versus to NBC Sports Network by the NBC Sports Group and what it could mean down the road as a potential competitor to ESPN.
Keith and I then opined on the rebranding of Sporting News Radio to Yahoo! Sports Radio, updating the name to make it more familiar to today’s generation of sports fans and also talking about what that means for ESPN Radio.
We broached the merger between Westwood One Radio and Dial-Global and what it means for WW1’s contracts with the NFL and the NCAA.
From there we went to the hiring of two new NFL studio analysts by ESPN including Eric Manmoron Mangini, former butcher of the Cleveland Browns.
And we finished off the segment with looking into the future of the Big East Conference as it hopes to lasso a big TV payday from either ESPN, NBC Sports Group or Fox.
With Andrew, Keith and I asked him about his experience during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver calling curling and how he rode the sport as it became popular during the 17 Days of Glory. In addition, we found out how Andrew got the gig with NBC Sports as it led to him calling handball in the 2008 Olympics in China.
We also talked about his other gigs for CBS calling The Masters and the U.S. Open 3-D broadcast.
We broached Andrew’s full-time gig for WNYT and how his bosses have allowed him to work on the national gigs which have also included calling the New York Giants preseason games. In addition, Keith and I asked him how he approaches his local sportscasts with the influence of ESPN and 24 hour access to sports.
And we asked Andrew what he reads and sites he visits to do his job.
A very enjoyable podcast. You can find it on iTunes by doing a search for “Sports Media Journal” or go right here to listen.
