As Mike Greenberg moved out of the ESPN Radio lineup after five years hosting solo in the late mornings, the company opted to revamp the daypart with a brand-new offering emanating from the West Coast. For the last several months, the national audio network has operated under its new lineup featuring Clinton Yates in the two-hour timeslot hosting live from studios in Los Angeles adjacent to Crypto.com Arena. Communicating with a production team largely located at ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Yates has created a show where he discusses matters surrounding assorted sports leagues, teams and athletes.
Yates remembers being asked if he wanted a co-host, something management did not believe to be necessary. Although Yates had always assumed that he would be part of a duo at minimum should he elicit a show in weekday prime, he jumped at the unexpected option to partake in a new creative challenge. As a result, the program is titled Clinton & Friends and leverages individual hosting ability with contributor insights, listener perspectives and other dialogue under the wing of authenticity and dedication.
“I really am honored and thankful they trusted me with that opportunity in terms of not just the timeslot, but the format,” Yates said, “and that’s something I’ve really tried to do is make sure that I’m being the person that people know I am on the air, and that is the trust that you have to have with listeners, the trust that you have to have with co-workers, so when we talk about ‘& Friends,’ I am doing it the way that I learned how to do it.”
The lineup alterations unfolded as Yates was on paternity leave following the birth of his son, and he embarked on punctilious research and preparation leading up to the show premiere. Working with ESPN executives David Roberts, Justin Craig and Liam Chapman in the formation and launch of the new program, he brought several ideas to the table and has sought to grow the product. The remainder of the weekday prime lineup features an array of shows introduced within the last three years as the network aims to continuously bolster its audience and overall consumption.
“I think the thing about ESPN Radio that’s always been a plus is that not everybody sounds the same, and that’s a difficult thing to do in terms of more largely for program directors because you do want to have sort of a consistent sound that listeners know they’re going to come to, but if it becomes too much of the same, then all of a sudden it gets very boring very quickly,” Yates said. “The diversity of talent at ESPN Radio is what makes it go.”
Following Mike Greenberg
Yates, however, discerns that people do not like him and regularly receives messages from social media users that he will never be Greenberg. In fact, he contends that some people view him as a know-it-all since he uses sophisticated verbiage and draws shrewd inferences through salient analysis. Rather than taking umbrage or loathing the sentiments, he leans into his penchant for refinement without forsaking elements of entertainment, nor losing sight of the responsibility gleaned from being in the spotlight.
“I think to me, the idea of credibility is not just one that other people think,” Yates said. “It’s one that you have to feel inside of you, and if you’re faking it, people are going to know, but that’s not the reason why not to do it. The reason why I can’t be a phony is because I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”
Yates acknowledges that Greenberg lives a different life than him and that there was not much collaboration between the two radio hosts amid the transition. Nonetheless, they have seen each other when Yates went to New York City to participate on First Take or guest host editions of Around the Horn. Although they have not worked together regularly, Yates filled in on Mike & Mike a few times over the years and is familiar with Greenberg’s ESPN portfolio.
“The only anxiety I had was in the idea that, first of all, the show wouldn’t look good or wouldn’t sound good,” Yates said. “I was very nervous about the actual product, I was less nervous about the position I was in.”
Welcoming in Friends to Join the Program
Moving into the spring, Yates has been satisfied with consumers dialing the show to express their thoughts and take part in the discussion. As someone who listens to sports talk radio outside of hosting his own show, he is aware of how valuable it is to afford patrons a voice in programs, and their inclusion is something that his show has stressed. Yates recognizes that callers range from regular devotees to newcomers across a variety of demographics, and he also accentuates external input through other means when such is warranted.
“If I read a story from somebody [about] some obscure thing, we’re naming the publication, we’re naming the byline,” Yates articulated. “If we hear something – a clip from another show or another thing – we’re not only highlighting who said it, but what station they were on and when they did it. That kind of stuff is important to me, just acknowledging folks.”
Yates is embedded in a collaborative process to determine the best topics to discuss, something through which he lends his perspectives realized through maintaining his coverage of sports, writing and making television appearances. Rather than watching the action from afar, he attends games and converses with others in the business while also remaining active in the community.
“Just the stuff that comes up, the news cycle, the editorial judgment, I don’t know how to describe it,” Yates said. “That’s the part that makes me me, and I do my best to kind of show distinctions that I think are important to be filled in terms of stuff that I find interesting, and that’s where we go.”
Taking the Lead From The Interruption
While Yates was on spring break as a college student at Miami University, he showed up unannounced to ESPN Zone in Washington, D.C. with a stack of newspapers and met Tony Kornheiser. Once he explained his career ambitions and rationale for arriving, Kornheiser invited him into the studio where he met Michael Wilbon, his colleague at the network and The Washington Post. Through conversations and assistance from Wilbon, he landed an internship with The George Michael Sports Machine and eventually received a chance to record a highlight reel on the stage with George Michael and Jim Vance looking on.
“Jim looked at me and he said, ‘You’re telling me you’ve never done this before?,’ and I said, ‘No, first time,’” Yates recalled. “He said, ‘George, this kid’s got a future in this business,’ and so early on, I was taught by people that were very good how to instill confidence, how to do things sort of the right way in terms of presenting yourself as a broadcaster, and I think it really helped me out going forward.”
With the goal of becoming a columnist at The Washington Post, Yates graduated and started working at Express editing news and penning articles. At the behest of reporter Dan Steinberg, he joined the sports desk for a two-week trial, but the stint ended up extending to six months and led him to wonder if he would ever return to his old job. Kevin Merida, who was the managing editor at the time, informed him he would not return to his local column because he was a better sportswriter.
“He said, ‘Just trust me on this, just stay there. It’ll be okay,’” Yates explained. “Six months later or whatever it was, he went to ESPN and he took me with him, so that’s how that all came is that I was lucky enough to be in a couple good spots at the right time.”
Merida served on the editorial team that launched The Undefeated, a multimedia platform looking at the intersections of sports, race and culture. Yates helped execute the vision and satisfy the outline of what the team was looking to achieve, and he penned several powerful stories and the ‘All Day’ blog that assumed a format resembling a newsletter.
After attending a town hall meeting in Chicago, Yates received a call from Aaron Solomon, the coordinating producer of Around the Horn, offering him a chance to serve as a panelist on the program. With the impending conclusion of Around the Horn next month, Yates asserts that participating on the show made him a better person and journalist. The program deviated from any previous experience he had in a newsroom, and he always ensured to bring his best and take accountability.
“I knew the vibe of the show, obviously, because I had literally watched every single episode in my entire life,” Yates said, “and by the time I finally got there, it was just a matter of being comfortable sharing the real parts of myself because as much as people want to say that writing or radio even for that matter is very intimate, there’s something very different about people seeing you talk on television that adds a different dimension to one’s own persona.”
Balancing National Discussion With a Local Flare
Before Yates started working in the current midday slot, he hosted locally on ESPN LA 710 and also had a national weekend show with Domonique Foxworth and Mina Kimes titled The Morning Roast. With this new project though, he did not want the local element to go away, reputing that the market is too big to act distant or detached. Part of that came through the set design, urging the team to replace an old backdrop and keep graffiti towers in the background to impart the veritable tableau.
“I’m like, ‘This is what downtown Los Angeles looks like. We got to be real. Why would we lie?,’ and so that particular part visually was very important to me,” Yates said. “The set looks great, which gives me a lot more confidence every single day of the week when I get on.”
With Yates becoming more acclimated to the new responsibility, he does not take anything for granted and is excited about innovations around the business. Instead of being tethered to a particular daypart, the show can expand its influence and reach through social media and digital content initiatives. On top of that, Yates is optimizing his professional network and highlighting the lives of others while demonstrating that being a national radio host is not an anthropomorphic assignment.
“There’s only a certain amount of championships you’re going to see, but for me, staying in the game and being able to be an evolving storyteller as things that I’ve seen unfold over my career with the same, not the same,” Yates outlined. “The fastball is not the only pitch I’m trying to throw, and over the course of my career, I’ve tried to mix in different pitches and do things different ways.”
With distinctive versatility through a multifarious medley of dissemination outlets, Yates is moving forward on the air looking to augment the quality of his show. Having played sports and being a fan, he takes pride in his longevity and ability to accurately report and divulge information in several different facets of the business. Yates is striving to foray on new adventures every year in the sports media business with an earned ethos behind his genuine discourse and giving people reasons to tune in.
“I did not feel that I could not be myself, and I still don’t feel that way, and so that’s very important to me, not because I have some sort of ego to be a certain thing or not, but I do feel that creativity is a large part of what makes radio fun,” Yates said. “If you can’t be yourself, then there’s no real point of doing it.”
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Derek Futterman is a former associate editor and sports media reporter for Barrett Media. He previously interned for Paramount within Showtime Networks, wrote for the Long Island Herald and served as lead sports producer at NY2C. Find him on X @derekfutterman.
