ESPN’S ‘Professor’ Shares Insights with Journalism Students

OK, sports fans, imagine sitting in a class on the second day of football free agency and openly browsing through ESPN on your laptop, sipping a Gatorade and checking John Clayton’s Twitter feed.

Sure, go ahead. The professor is OK with that. Wait…isn’t that John Clayton on the big screen in the front of the classroom? And on the big screen in the back of the classroom?

Welcome to the world of sports reporting with the man called “The Professor” actually teaching his first college class. The magic of a high-tech classroom in Fisher Hall beams ESPN Senior Writer Clayton, a football insider and Duquesne alumnus, from a home studio where he sits, time zones away from 16 advanced journalism students in his sights via video.

Clayton the professor is very much aligned with the persona of Clayton the reporter: personable and quick on his feet, with off-the-cuff encyclopedic knowledge of the sport that he’s covered for longer than his students have been alive. He shares with students how contracts can be misleading, to the millions of dollars; how he keeps his own databases on contract amounts and salary caps; and how, given all the hide-and-seek games of the business, he’s spent at least three years of his life waiting in hotel lobbies.

Class time zips by. Shelly Anderson, a sportswriter at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is on hand to fill in any gaps with students, and “The Professor’s” dean, Dr. James Swindal, stops by to see that the technology for this video class is all that. And it is. It’s so real-time, it’s like Clayton is in the room.

Clayton switches topics to profile writing, and he encourages that students head into interviews with an armory of background and no fear of where a well-formed question might lead. Players, he reminds students, are people. Some have higher privacy fences. “Our job is to put everything out there that we can,” Clayton said.

The Professor provides constructive feedback on his students’ audio files and handles assignments and homework through email. Pleased to tap into Clayton’s expertise, the students rise to his expectations. “I hope the current affairs educate the students,” Clayton said. “It’s a good group.”