Work portfolio

If you’re looking for HIGHLIGHTS of my work, maybe 30-40 stories from all my different subject areas, check Muckrack.

An ARCHIVE of my work, dating back to my college paper, is available at Diigo, where everything is carefully tagged for easy searches (see below).

And if you’d like to see a traditional RESUME, feel free. For something less traditional, read “How I got here.”

First up, seven BOOKS:

Next, a blog I’ve maintained since 2003 called Mostly Modern Media, to which I added a podcast called X Marks the Pod (it’s Gen X-themed) in 2021.

On this site, I’ve broken down my work into six broad categories.

CULTURE is basically a catch-all for anything that isn’t sports: news, opinion, television, and a whole lot of music.

OLYMPICS AND OTHER SPORTS focuses on my work covering Olympics (four in person, a few more from the USA TODAY office or my basement) and includes the odd piece on basketball or football. I’ve also had a particular interest in women’s sports and, oddly enough for someone born and raised in the state of Georgia, winter sports.

MMA is another topic that would’ve seemed odd to people who knew growing up. But I was USA TODAY’s first dedicated MMA beat writer, and I’ve gone on to write for The Guardian and Bloody Elbow.

GENERAL SOCCER is the catch-all for men’s soccer and broad topics affecting U.S. and global soccer as a whole.

WOMEN’S SOCCER is a topic I covered on occasion in college, where I saw Mia Hamm and North Carolina tear apart my schoolmates. As the sport has grown, faded and rebounded, I’ve found no shortage of interesting stories.

YOUTH SOCCER is a topic I started covering even before I had kids playing. Now I see it both from the perspective of national reformists and sideline parents.

  • The Guardian: The erudite British publication has published my work on women’s soccer, MMA, Olympic sports and the Flat Earth movement.
  • FourFourTwo: The soccer site is a terrific outlet for my youth soccer pieces and occasional some thoughts on women’s soccer.
  • Bloody Elbow: The surprisingly intellectual MMA site with the violent name has published a lot of my work on The Ultimate Fighter and other MMA topics.
  • SoccerWire: The regional youth soccer site published many of my youth soccer diatribes in 2015 and 2016.
  • The Huffington Post: I’ve occasionally contributed pieces here as a means of promoting my work. (You may have heard they don’t pay contributors.)
  • OZY: I was one of this startup’s early contributors, writing a bit about the Olympics and chess but also a couple of pieces on Millennials and small towns.
  • Bleacher Report: I’ve contributed to Olympic coverage.
  • Popdose: A bunch of talented writers joined forces for this pop-culture site, for which I write a lot of music pieces and occasionally something on sports or other entertainment.
  • Fox Soccer: Several staffing changes and redesigns ago, I wrote a few women’s soccer pieces. I also had a Women’s World Cup piece at Fox News Latino.
  • ESPN: The Worldwide Leader brought me aboard as a freelancer for the 2011 Women’s World Cup, and I wrote more women’s soccer and MMA pieces for them — a little more than 70 total pieces in exactly one year.
  • USA TODAY: My longest stint with one employer was a little over a decade from 1999 to 2010. My work duties ranged from technical stuff on the site to being cageside at MMA events. It’s complicated. Even after I left, I continued to do freelance work for the paper, the site and its affiliated magazines.
  • Knight Ridder Tribune (Washington, DC): My first job in the capital region was at a wire service, now called McClatchy Tribune, where I dabbled in soccer columns, most notably after the Women’s World Cup final in 1999.
  • News & Record (Greensboro, NC): My home from 1994 to 1998, again on the copy desk and in online production, but I did a bit of writing on sports, technology, books and fajitas.
  • Star-News (Wilmington, NC): My newspaper from 1991 to 1994, though I spent much of that time on the copy desk. I made a triumphant return with a guest column in 2016.
  • The Chronicle (Duke University): My beloved college newspaper, for which I wrote about everything from basketball to why we should get rid of letter grades. I’ve also been published in Duke’s alumni magazine.

I’m also a frequent podcast and radio guest on shows such as The Mixxed Zone (women’s soccer), The United States of Soccer (SiriusXM, formerly Soccer Morning), KNPR (Las Vegas, MMA segment) and elsewhere.

Finally, no list of my work is complete without my Master of Arts thesis on The Changing Face of News in the Information Age.

ONLINE CONTENT INNOVATIONS

I started in online journalism in 1995 and made it my full-time job in 1996. Yes, back in the Notepad-and-FTP days.