During the course of her career, Julie Stewart-Binks has covered many different sports and events. When she was doing sideline reporting on the MLS and college football for FS1 or ESPN, she wanted to make sure that her reports were a little different from everyone else’s.
Stewart-Binks explained how she did that and much more on The Sessions with Renee Paquette podcast on The Volume. In order to make them different, she made sure to do extra work so that she was always prepared whenever it was time for her to give a report:
“I really learned it when I was doing MLS and college football. We would always be in the same meetings together, so you are getting the same information. I always in my head thought if I’m in these meetings, none of this is mine. It’s all everyone’s, fair game. I would have it as information, but even if I asked a question and I’d be like hey guys, can I have this answer? Because the way brains work, if they heard something, they might say it on air. It’s the nature of a human talking about something.”
“I regularly did a ton of interviews outside to get extra stuff. In any kind of reporting in a game, you can have 3-4 awesome stories/hits and I’m going to get these in. Then, the game goes completely different. None of this stuff is relevant anymore. Now, I really have kind of hits on every guy that can potentially do something and have something extra.”
During the Stanley Cup Playoffs this year, Stewart-Binks was part of the Turner Sports crew for the Lightning-Maple Leafs First Round series. There were times she would be the only person from Turner in the broadcast meetings, so she made sure to give the information to the rest of the crew when she saw them:
“For TNT, they would have different crews come in each game. I didn’t meet my crew till 6 PM for an 8 PM puck drop. They had missed the meetings. I got to do the broadcast meetings with SportsNet. I would then go and use a lot of the stuff and tell it to the people that it would help. What can I add to the conversation that these guys don’t already know?”
As for what Stewart-Binks wants to do next, she knows she wants to continue to do more work with hockey, but she knows she is influenced by many things, and she admits that might not be best for her career:
“I would like to work in hockey more. I know that’s where my heart is… I want to work in hockey. Someone can ask me a question about hockey and I can riff like I know it.”
“I’m still very much open to doing so many different things. That’s what’s interesting is through all of my travels and this has probably hurt my career, I get influenced by so many different things.”
In addition to covering more hockey, Stewart-Binks wants to take her own podcast, Drinks With Binks, to the next level:
“I like Drinks With Binks. I think it has a lot more ability to do something. I’d like to take it outside of my apartment and make it kind of like an Anthony Bourdain kind of thing and in the sports world and beyond, but mostly sporting events. Make it more of a travel interview show.”
