“It was the stories that I woke up the next day thinking about … I want complicated stories about complicated people making difficult choices and facing real things.”

Journalist, professor, and author Jane McManus joins us this week to talk about her career, The Year’s Best Sports Writing, her new book and more. 

Jane was the editor of the 2024 edition of The Year’s Best Sports Writing. She and Brian do a deep dive into what that job actually looked like. Jane describes how she got the gig, how Richard Deitsch helped her, how she leaned on a group of fellow journalists as an advisory board, and what she was looking for in picking the best sports stories. We talk about the importance of scene setting at the start of a feature story, of showing the work that the reporter has done, and the deep reporting you see in a great piece of investigative journalism. 

They also talk about her introductory essay, a form Brian has studied at great length. 

Jane also talks about her book, The Fast Track, and why this was the book she wrote at this stage in her career. She describes the biggest differences between writing articles and a book, and why she doesn't want her students to outsource their thinking by letting AI do any writing. 

“There's no Tik Tok, there’s no short form video on YouTube, hot-take sports talk show that is going to force you to think about something the way that at a well written long form piece of journalism is.”

Links

The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2024

The Fast Track by Jane McManus

The Three-Body Problem (The best thing Jane’s read lately.)

Middlemarch (The best thing Jane’s read lately

A Gentleman in Moscow (The best thing Brian’s read lately.)

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