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Bomani Jones, host of The Right Time with Bomani Jones, was the guest of Andrew Marchand on his podcast through Marchand Sports Media. The two hit on a number of topics including Jones’ background as an economics student and the amount of content that is now designed with the gambler in mind.
As for his major, Jones said with his mom being an economics professor and with chemistry being “needlessly hard,” he decided to go the economics route. He also said it has helped him with his sports reporting.
Marchand said, “I talk to younger people who are in college or high school who want to get into this business, and one of the things I always tell them is don’t major in journalism, maybe minor in journalism, get involved, newspaper, radio, TV, websites, whatever your school has. You were an economics major, was that by design that you had journalism in your mind, or were you going to go straight on economics, what’s the dream at that point?”
Jones went on to tell his story and said that journalism came later but he was glad he had studied what he did.
“I do think it probably helps you, even talking sports, to have a level of expertise in economics,” Jones said. “Journalism is a vocation, you should not major in a vocation, unless you want to be an engineer or an accountant, you should not major in a vocation, and that’s what journalism is.
“You can get, and just about everybody who’s majored in journalism and worked in this business has basically told me the same thing, what you’ll need to actually be a journalist, from what you get from undergrad, you get by working at the campus paper, or working at any other paper, that’s where you’re going to figure that out. So, my mother always says that it is more important to learn what you’re going to write about than it is to learn how to write. You can learn how to write, but in the trenches, you need a little bit more help to form your thoughts and develop your mind. I don’t think you should major in journalism. Do something that makes your mind a little bit more limber and more flexible, and then you can go figure out how to do the other stuff.”
Marchand asked Jones his take on the state of sports media. Jones pointed to the amount of content that is now tied to gambling and wonders how long the money will be there to support all of the content.
“…At this point, we are at the mercy of the gambling, and that makes things very interesting when the money seems to all be coming from the same place, and the place that it’s coming from to me is something that is sports-adjacent, but I don’t actually think it’s really that tied to why any of us got into this in the first place.
“Bob Costas made this point, I worked on his last show on HBO, and he did an essay where he made the point that we’re being flooded with all this stuff about gambling and sports, but none of us got into sports for the gambling, in fact, the people who are really into the gambling found the gambling after they got into the sports. So, what is going to happen, no matter what, is the content is going to become more geared toward information that is useful for people who are making picks. That’s where I think we’re going to see more and more things go…We’re seeing it more in the actual broadcasting of the game, and if your content is not going to help people gamble, I don’t know for how long people are going to be willing to pay for it.”
