I’ll be honest with you.
This is the most difficult Barrett Sports Media feature I’ve written.
It turns out that 37-minute interviews in which I constantly interrupt in an attempt to gain clarification or ask a follow-up question don’t yield neat and tidy transcripts.
But while the physical writing of the story may be difficult, it’s a story that deserves to be told.
It’s the story of how something unexpected can spark an entire career, how one media misfortune doesn’t have to derail a journey, and how hard work and ingenuity can yield something really fun and beneficial.
Jason Churchill is the founder of Prospect Insider, a website dedicated to the Seattle Mariners, the MLB Draft and the Mariners minor league system. He’s also the host of the Baseball Things podcast, which also focuses on the Mariners.
As a lifelong Mariners fan, I’ve known of Churchill for a while as he’s been a fixture of the Mariners blogosphere for nearly twenty years, but I’ve followed him closer than ever this season, and in the rare circumstances where my personal fandom intersects with my work life, he’s come on my show and been a great guest.
As I got to know Churchill personally and his work even better, I started asking myself a bunch of questions: Is this a full-time gig? A side gig? Is it profitable? Does he have a media background? Or did he just stumble into everything?
“It kind of all happened on accident, to be honest with you,” Churchill told BSM.
And with that, the story. A story that has left me pretty inspired.
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Churchill calls himself a late-bloomer. He admits to “loafing” through his 20s, but he eventually latched on with the precursor to 24/7 Sports in 2003, then called The Insider. He got that job, covering baseball for the site’s spinoff InsidethePark.com, based on the sites founder seeing his commentary on baseball message boards and thinking he may know what he’s talking about.
Once at InsidethePark.com Churchill grinded, helping the site find its own baseball niche, covering the Minor Leagues, and the snowball of opportunities began.
“We got a little attention because it’s a lot easier to get credentialed at minor league games, so that got us in the ballpark, which was key,” he said. “And then I wake up one day a year later and I realize that I have connections. I have scouts and front office people that I’ve run into at the ballpark that I talk to on a regular basis, and now the local papers want me to do things for them, and that’s just kind of how it started.”
Prospect Insider was born in 2006, and while not a full-time job monetarily, Churchill had a full-time tenacity when covering the Mariners and their system. He was noticed by ESPN and hired to cover the MLB Draft, working with draft expert Keith Law. After the 2009 draft he was hired full-time by the company, writing for ESPN.com while staying in Seattle.
He stayed at ESPN for 4.5 years, and then another media curveball came his way as he was hired by 1090 The Fan in Seattle, a CBS Sports Radio affiliate that no longer exists.
“I was a guest on that show weekly during the baseball season, and then one day, the host, Steve Sandmeyer, said ‘Why don’t you come in once a month and do this in the studio?’ And about the third or fourth time I did it, he said ‘Why don’t you come be on the show permanently?’”
And thus, the 1090 The Fan show with Sandmeyer, Churchill, and Seattle radio fixture Bill Swartz was born, lasting for roughly two years before CBS Radio pulled the plug on local programming in 2015.
“That was the coolest thing,” he said. “Every once in a while, I have people come up to me at a game or they see me at a grocery store and they’ll ask me ‘Aren’t you Jason? Didn’t you and Steve Sandmeyer have that show? We miss that show. It was so cool, so funny, and it was the best show and I wish you guys would have lasted.’ And it’s just great to hear that sort of thing. I still get that to this day and we haven’t been on the air for seven years.”
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You know the cliché. When one door closes, another door opens.
Sure, the radio show was dead, but Churchill and Sandmeyer launched a podcast before I believe I had ever heard of a podcast, and that lasted for about a year before logistically it became too tough. The on-air reps of the radio and the podcast mixed with the understanding of releasing audio on the internet undoubtedly set Churchill up for success in the next steps of his career, hosting Baseball Things.
While Churchill hasn’t made podcasting his full-time gig because he has a job currently at a company called Data Skrive, which manipulates data to provide automated content to clients including the AP, BetMGM, USA Today, and ESPN, it is a space in which he is thriving, having fun, and making money. And he’s certainly one of the top follows for Mariners fans, which is pretty impressive considering he’s no longer on a traditional media, everyday platform.
While I didn’t press him for the exact financial benefits of the podcast or Prospect Insider, he did tell me that he has his content set up through Patreon and has 600 subscribers, with people paying anywhere from $5 to $25 per month. The higher the tier, the more content you get access to.
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As I get to the end of this feature, I am thinking to myself: “Why did I want to write this? What am I looking for readers to take away from it?” I think what I want you to take away from it is the following:
- this is just a great story of how careers work. You are in media, so am I. We all have goals, but goals change and paths change, and the route we take to achieve our goals is never linear.
Churchill started as a message board commentator and parlayed that into helping run a baseball site and turned that into his own site, which morphed into ESPN for nearly five years, which turned into earning radio guest spots, which turned into a co-hosting opportunity on a daily show, which turned into a job in data, which affords time for subscription-based podcast and web content work. That, to me, is pretty remarkable. We’re often so focused on reaching a solitary goal and we think there’s only one way to achieve it. It turns out that there are many ways to reach a great destination. We all want to make an impact in media. Churchill has done that, even if the road has been winding. Also,
- It’s important to realize that losing a job doesn’t mean the end of a career. Despite losing the radio job at 1090 The Fan, Churchill is doing great. He didn’t have to change fields entirely – he found a way to adapt and was versatile enough to take the lessons and skills acquired in daily radio into this next foray.
- Finally, the answer is yes – it IS possible to start a podcast or a website and make money. I think every one of us secretly wishes we could do just that – be our own boss and just pump out content and get paid for it. But despite wishing for it, it just seems overwhelming. We know that podcasting is lucrative if you are at BlueWire, Barstool, or the Ringer, but as an individual, the idea of making money has seemed impossible. Churchill is proving that it’s not. And while it’s not his specific full-time job, I have no doubt that it could be, and it could be for any of us too. That was refreshing to learn.
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This was truly the hardest piece I’ve ever written for BSM. But as Jason Churchill’s career proves, even a winding and turbulent road can lead to a great end game.
Hopefully this feature followed suit.
***While covering the Mariners specifically, Jason knows all baseball and I welcome you to reach out to him for your radio and podcasting spots @ProspectInsider.
Brady Farkas is a sports radio professional with 5+ years of experience as a Program Director, On-Air Personality, Assistant Program Director and Producer in Burlington, VT and Albany, NY. He’s well versed in content creation, developing ideas to generate ratings and revenue, working in a team environment, and improving and growing digital content thru the use of social media, audio/video, and station websites. His primary goal is to host a daily sports talk program for a company/station that is dedicated to serving sports fans. You can find him on Twitter @WDEVRadioBrady and reach him by email at bradyfarkas@gmail.com.
