Our next interviewee in the “20 Questions” series is Matthew Fairburn of New York Upstate. Prior to his arrival in Buffalo, I followed Matthew and Dan on their Mocking The Draft SB Nation site. When Joe approached me about this series, it was a pretty cool idea because we get a chance to give you as a reader insight into the folks you read/listen/watch. It’s also for me personally a cool way to highlight folks that followed a passion professionally. But enough of that, on with the interview!
1. Were you a sports fan growing up and if so, what were your teams?
I’m not sure I would be where I am if I didn’t love sports growing up. I grew up with my dad and older brother both loving sports, and I followed right along. For those who don’t know, I grew up about thirty minutes north of Boston, but I didn’t like any of the Boston sports teams as a kid. I wanted to be different. When I started to get into football, the Jaguars were the hot team and I jumped on the bandwagon. I probably should have jumped off while my friends were celebrating Patriots Super Bowl wins, but I never did. I’ll never forget Dennis Northcutt dropping a touchdown pass in the third quarter of the divisional round against the Patriots in 2007. I really thought the Jaguars were going to ruin New England’s perfect season, but that hammerhead dropped a touchdown, and the Patriots pulled away in the fourth quarter. I’ll always believe the 2007 Jaguars were a team of destiny that picked the wrong year.
I also rooted for the Flyers in hockey and the Diamondbacks in baseball. Those were the two sports I played competitively. Mom didn’t think football was safe. She was ahead of her time in that regard. These days, I don’t have much time to be a fan. I watch the Red Sox when I can, the Flyers occasionally and Mizzou football sometimes. The fandom has been sucked out of me by the job for the most part, though. I still love watching sports, I just watch them a bit differently than I did before.
2. When did you decide you wanted to work in journalism?
The story I always tell is when my seventh grade teacher pulled me aside and told me I should consider being a sports writer. I was stupid enough to believe her and never cared to develop a backup plan.
3. What do you enjoy doing outside of your “day job”? Any hobbies?
Nothing too crazy. I read quite a bit, both sports and non sports. I play pickup hockey on the weekends, snowboard during the winter, hike and golf during the summer. I like to travel, too. That’s part of why I love my job.
4. Hard G or soft for ‘gif’?
It’s a soft “g.” Don’t trust anyone who tells you otherwise.
5. What experiences do you find the most valuable in that time at Mizzou?
Can I say all of them? Honestly, I wouldn’t trade my time at Mizzou for anything. Two months after I got there, I was storming the field after Mizzou beat No. 1 Oklahoma. By the time I was a senior, I was traveling around the Southeastern Conference covering a Mizzou team that made an unexpected run to the title game. I hung out with tailgaters in The Grove at Ole Miss, partied at Wright Thompson’s house in Oxford, spent a week in Dallas covering the Cotton Bowl and did it all for class credit.
Along the way, I met so many incredible people who pushed me to be better. Mizzou attracts the best journalism students in the country (don’t @ me Syracuse grads), and that culture brought out the best in me. I went there not knowing exactly who I was or what I wanted to do within the journalism world, and I graduated with enough experience to prepare for this job right out of school.
I have a considerable amount of debt to show for it, but you could triple that debt and I would go to Mizzou all over again. It’s the best journalism school in the country, and the friends I met there will be my closest friends for the rest of my life.
6. With your beat also encompassing Syracuse, how do you balance travel between the region and what you cover? How has your job changed with the transition from print to online copy? Do you see a world where grabbing a paper from a news stand is obsolete and everything is digital?
Well, I’m not technically on the Syracuse beat, so I don’t have to do too much balancing. I live in Orchard Park full time, I’m at One Bills Drive every day during the season and I travel to road game. I’ve actually only been to the newsroom in Syracuse about a half dozen times. Where it does come into play is when I’m covering something like the NFL Scouting Combine. I’ll look for Syracuse angles where they present themselves, but I’m a Bills beat reporter first and foremost.
So in college I worked for a daily newspaper when I covered the Mizzou football team. We had traditional print deadlines and were focused on the print product before anything else. My job now is essentially the opposite. I’m told not to worry about the print product and focus only on digital. In some ways, that’s a huge benefit because I’m not rushing around dealing with print deadlines during night games. On the other hand, I operate on the assumption that my deadline is immediate with any game coverage or breaking news I’m writing. The old days would have been nice, but the industry is heading toward not only a digital first model but also a digital only model. Anyone who thinks otherwise is either in denial or not paying attention.
7. What were your influences growing up?
My mom and dad were my biggest influences. My mom is a school teacher and my dad works for a pool company. They are the two hardest working people I know, and I like to think some of that rubbed off on me. I worked for my dad at the pool company all through high school and summers during college to make money while I was working unpaid internships. A lot of parents would have told me to pick a more realistic career path, but they have been my two biggest supporters since the moment I left for Mizzou.
From a writing standpoint, I didn’t develop my strongest influences until I got to college. Charles Pierce, Wright Thompson, Robert Mays, Seth Wickersham, Lee Jenkins and J.R. Moehringer are some of my favorite sports writers.
8. What was the biggest change in moving from Boston to Missouri to now Buffalo?
I think both of those moves just made me more and more independent. When I was 18, all of my friends and family were in Massachusetts or the surrounding area. Moving away from that forced me to become independent and adapt to new cultures and different types of people. I’m glad I’ve moved around, because I’ve experienced much more of the country and met way more people than I otherwise would have.
9. How did you get involved with Mocking The Draft?
When I got to Mizzou, I had already built my own site that I wrote fantasy football and NFL Draft content on just for fun. My roommate at the time told me I should find a way to work for SB Nation. So I emailed someone at SB Nation about starting an NFL Draft blog, because I didn’t see one on their list of blogs. Somehow, my email made its way to Dan Kadar, who asked if I wanted to write a few times a week. It wasn’t for pay, but I jumped at the chance. A year later, I became the co-editor of the site and got paid a small amount each month to up my workload. I got to cover two NFL Scouting Combines with Dan and even traveled to Radio City Music Hall to cover the 2013 NFL Draft. Through it all, Dan and I became great friends. We still do our podcast, and I can honestly say without him I wouldn’t be where I am. He was really the first person who ever took a chance on me, and I’m very grateful.
10. Do you enjoy covering the draft more or less than your day-to-day beat reporter gig?
Well, the draft gig didn’t pay as much or involve nearly as much travel as this job does, so it’s tough to compare the two. I will say working with Dan covering the draft was a hell of a lot of fun. Obsessing over the NFL Draft for 365 days a year makes the payoff in the spring that much better. I definitely miss the days when I would get eyes on hundreds of prospects in every draft. That’s just not possible anymore.
11. What was your biggest takeaway from your work at MTD? Do you think it was an advantage for you to get most of your experience as someone who didn’t cover a beat “traditionally”?
More than anything, working at Mocking the Draft just confirmed for me that this was what I wanted to do. I got a taste of the sports media world working there. Dan really gave me the freedom to do whatever I wanted. I wrote a few longform stories, traveled to cover some big events and had a massive platform for my work. That was definitely the type of place where you get out of it what you put in, and I’ve carried that over to other areas of my life.
I absolutely think my non-traditional experience is what helped me land my job. When I graduated from Mizzou, I applied for somewhere around 75 jobs all over the country. I only got a handful of interviews. The best job I applied for is the one I ended up getting. One thing my current editor said to me shortly after hiring me is that I’m not a newspaper guy, and that’s why I was such an attractive candidate. Even though I never had a big newspaper internship, I had a ridiculous amount of digital experience between SB Nation and the internships I had (NESN.com and CSNNE.com). I also got the experience of covering an SEC team for a daily newspaper, so I had the best of both worlds in a way. My sports editor at the Columbia Missourian, Greg Bowers, always wanted us covering the game differently and finding unique angles that others weren’t chasing, so even though I was working at a newspaper, it didn’t have that feel. My current editors wanted someone who would think outside the box and be able to recognize how to deliver news online. I’m lucky I found an editor who recognized my skill set and shared a vision for how things should be done. I had editors turn me down for jobs because I didn’t know how to design a newspaper page. I still don’t and likely never will.
12. What was your biggest “miss” draft wise? Your biggest “nailed it” moment?
Oh, man. I don’t know if this counts, but I wrote a paper my senior year of high school on why the Rams should draft Jimmy Clausen over Sam Bradford. That ended up being pretty awful. I was also pretty high on Tyler Bray and Blaine Gabbert in their respective drafts. Some of my biggest “nailed it” moments were with Sheldon Richarson, Muhammad Wilkerson, Josh Norman and T.Y. Hilton.
13. What were three things you wish you knew when you first started that you know now?
I wish I knew that this industry is more welcoming than people think. People like to help each other out, and it’s ok to ask for advice or help if you need it. I wish I knew it isn’t that complicated. The writing, the interviewing, the source building. Everyone makes it all out to be difficult, but it only gets easier with practice. I also wish I knew that it’s ok to break the rules of journalism and even media once in a while. Some of my favorite pieces of sports writing are unconventional.
14. What is something you’d love to see in the next 5 years happen in sports media – industry wide or just particular to Buffalo/Syracuse?
I would love to see the death of the traditional game recap. I think that’s already starting to happen, but I still see a lot of reporters spending time writing game recaps that I just don’t think people are interested in reading. Let’s push ourselves to deliver smarter and more creative content.
I would also like to see the NFL become a bit more lax in how it allows its video to be shared. I think you end up with smarter fans that way. It would also be cool if more teams did what the Falcons and Vikings are doing by letting reporters watch film with coaches. But now I’m just getting greedy.
15. Are there any local influences on you and your style?
This is an interesting question. First off, I can’t say enough about how I’ve been welcomed into the market over the last couple of years. Guys like Joe Buscaglia from WKBW, Mike Rodak at ESPN, Jonah Javad at WGRZ, Tim Graham and the rest of the crew at the Buffalo News have all been a huge help in different ways. There are a lot of talented media types in Buffalo, and they are all a hell of a lot of fun to be around.
Personally, I’ve tried to come here and be my own person and writer. Of course, the competition influence what I do and how I work. But I’m always trying to take a different approach or find the stories other people aren’t covering. Group think is a dangerous trap to fall into, so while I admire the work of a lot of people in Western New York (Graham, Buscaglia, Tyler Dunne, Bucky and Sully, etc.), I don’t necessarily try to emulate anyone’s style. Hopefully that makes sense.
16. As someone that is outside the Buffalo/WNY/Syracuse bubble, what observations have you made in your time in the area?
I had never been here before I took the job, so I came in not knowing much about the area. I’ve grown to love living in Buffalo. It may not have the bells and whistles of some other big cities, but the people are great and so is the food. It’s cheap to live here, it’s a hockey town and the traffic is reasonable. Plus, it’s closed to Canada. I heard some horror stories about Buffalo before I moved, but it’s really exceeded my expectations.
17. How important do you think it is for a MSM personality to have a social media presence?
It’s massively important. Sometimes I wish Twitter and Facebook weren’t so important to what I do, but that’s the nature of the business. I look at it a few different ways. Social media is a great way to reach your audience and interact with the people who are consuming your work. It’s also one of the main ways to drive traffic, which in turn pays the bills. Anyone who ignores those facts is going to get left behind.
Also, let’s face it, this industry isn’t the most stable. Newspapers are folding all over the country and you never really know which day could be your last in this line of work. Social media provides a layer of security. My employer could fire me, but they can’t take my social media presence. As a writer, if you have enough people that will follow your work regardless of the publication you work for, that’s security in and of itself. I’m envious of a guy like Wright Thompson, who can quit Twitter and still have hundreds of thousands of people reading every single thing he publishes. That’s not the case for me, though. I almost need to spend as much time promoting my work and sharing my personality as I do actually writing. I wish I could just write, but that’s not the world we live in.
18. What’s your ultimate goal in terms of where you want to be in the field?
If you had asked me this question a few years ago, I would have told you the job I have now was a pie-in-the-sky, ultimate-goal type of job. I still think of it that way, too. I cover an NFL team for a publication that pays for me to travel to every road game, and I’m doing it five or six years earlier than I expected. I skipped a lot of steps, and I’m very fortunate.
Now that I’m ahead of where I expected to be, I’ve had to rethink the 10-year plan. All I know is that I love to write, and I love sports. As long as my job involves some combination of those things, I’ll be happy. Sports Illustrated would be cool. I would love to work for someone like Bill Simmons (Bill if you’re reading, hit me up). I want to write a few books, too. Maybe a novel. I’m a little bit all over the place, and I don’t want to put a ceiling on myself.
19. What sort of advice would you give to any college kid looking to get into the media?
If you’re not ready to give yourself to this profession completely, it will eat you alive. You have to be willing to say yes to everything, travel anywhere in the country to get the right job and work sometimes insane hours to get ahead. Nobody gets into this for the money, so there has to be something deeper driving you. Like anything in life, hard work goes a long way. While there’s plenty of competition in this field and a lot of demand for the jobs, there are also a lot of lazy people in media. Go outwork them. Oh, and read a lot. Reading makes you a better writer.
20. Will you attempt to re-grow your beard to its formerly McGregor-legendary status?
I’m not sure I can ever take it to the length I had it before I cut it in January. That was beyond McGregor and even Fitz. However, now that I know it can grow that long, I’ll be tempted to let it go again when the weather turns.
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