Join the Crew

Five years and nine months ago, three fellow basketball nerds and USC alums started this podcast with high hopes and an idea to tell timely and nuanced stories by interviewing the journalists closest to the action, with an emphasis on team beat reporters and national writers covering the league. We’ve (and pardon the switch from third-person to first-) also conducted a number of book interview specials. The founding hosts included Loren Lee Chen, Joshua Fischman and Aaron Fischman, though a few years ago Joshua moved on to focus on other projects. Over the years, we’ve done incredible things, we’ve fallen short in some ways, we’ve learned, we’ve grown, and we’ve had loads of fun along the way, all the while amassing incredible experience and expanding our connections within the basketball journalism community.

((Over 157 episodes, we’ve brought on 110 different guests, and their total Twitter following is approaching 2.37 million. We’ve been blessed to interview some of the very best. While it’s impossible to name all of our favorites, some notable OTNB guests include Alex Kennedy, Jonathan Abrams, Holly MacKenzie, Sekou Smith (He was such a kind soul. Rest in peace.), Tas Melas, Howard Beck, Jake Fischer, Melissa Isaacson, Dave Zirin, Zach Harper, Michael Pina, Lang Whitaker, Kacy Sager, Adam Mares, Kelly Dwyer, Coral Lu, Harrison Faigen, Adena Jones, Seth Rosenthal, Jovan Buha, Michael Levin, Dan Devine, Max Rappaport, Sue Favor, Eric Pincus, Ian Levy, Keith Smith, Sam Vecenie, James Edwards, James Herbert, Katy Winge, John Karalis and Will & Grace co-creator David Kohan. For a comprehensive list, visit our six Interview Central pages sorted by season.)) We’re extremely proud of the show and look forward to its future as a vehicle to tell more illuminating NBA stories via our strong guest interviews.

At this juncture, we hope to transition into emeritus-like roles, where we help coordinate booking and mentor new contributors without being involved in the production every single week. Accordingly, we’re looking for talented, hard-working and hungry journalists who want to do what we’ve done. This opportunity is low-commitment to start and would begin early this offseason, around the start of August. To begin, you neither would need to record every week nor need to worry about audio editing the first show or two on which you appear. Unfortunately, the contributor position will be unpaid until the podcast turns a profit, but it will provide an excellent opportunity to build your portfolio with interview clips and, as mentioned before, gain experience, meet established reporters and show the basketball community and prospective employers what you can do.

For now, we’re looking for four to eight talented and passionate contributors to be involved for a span of 11 weeks, stretching from the start of August through mid-October (just ahead of the 2021-22 regular season). Each new contributor should expect to appear on between three and six episodes over that stretch. (*Because we’d like to find and develop on-air talent and on-air chemistry can be helpful, friends/couples/acquaintances are encouraged to apply together, although solo applicants have just as good of a chance of acceptance.) We release a new episode once per week, but the recording and publication dates are flexible given the availability of everyone involved.

In order to apply for a contributor position with On the NBA Beat, please provide the following to contact@onthenbabeat.com by Thursday, July 22, at 11:59 p.m. EDT.

  1. A paragraph (three to seven sentences) on your experience in sports media and your level of formal training, if any, what you think you can bring to OTNB and why you want to contribute to OTNB (i.e., what’s in it for you?)
  2. How much experience do you have editing audio files in Audacity or a similar program? If none, would you like to learn?
  3. Top 4 choices (in order) for teams from which you’d like to interview a beat reporter (No. 1 cannot be the team you watch most often). For the No. 1 choice, provide one to two sentences explaining why AND write in bullet point format six to eight topics that would have to be discussed with our guest (e.g., coach Millard Fillmore’s long-term future in Las Vegas).
  4. Listen to the first 30 minutes of Ep. 147 (Sarah Spencer) or Ep. 150 (Espo’s first appearance) or Ep. 153 (Pratik Patel) and (a.) list three things you liked about the episode, (b.) list two aspects that could have been improved and (c.) choose a title we could’ve gone with but didn’t, keeping in mind both our standard format for titles AND that titles shouldn’t ever be too long.   
  5. (Optional) If you enjoy the particular episode you chose to listen to, please consider leaving OTNB a short review on Apple Podcasts. We would greatly appreciate the gesture, which helps new audiences find our show.

Roughly, what goes into each episode?

  1. Book Guest: We book a guest for the episode, preferably at least a week in advance if possible.
  2. Craft Script: Once the guest agrees, the two co-hosts who will be appearing begin outlining the script with bullet point discussion topics. Throughout the week, the hosts add detail to each discussion topic using relevant story links, notable quotes, telling stats and more. Questions are formulated.
  3. Send Topics to Guest: At least two days before the interview time, we contact the forthcoming guest to (a.) confirm the time (b.) share our list of potential discussion topics w/out including all the detailed notes and (c.) if it’s a first-time guest, we ask them to start thinking of a little-known fun fact or short anecdote about themselves that we can use in our intro.
  4. Conduct Interview: Via Zencastr, the two hosts and the guest record the interview following the pre-show protocol, which should take no more than 5-10 minutes and includes asking for the fun fact/anecdote, confirming the guest’s credentials/current projects and/or name pronunciation and requesting a promo hit (something like “I’m Lonnie Leprechaun of the Boston Globe, and I’m On the NBA Beat.”). The interview should span approximately 30 to 40 minutes. Depending on the nature of the questions and the length and detail of the guest responses, the interview is typically made up of nine to 13 discussion topics.
  5. Edit and Produce Episode: This includes adding a customized intro (including the guest’s name and credentials, the context for the team/conference/topic (s)he is discussing and the guest fun fact if applicable), which one of the hosts records after the interview with the guest no longer on the call. Also included in the finished episode, in order, from the beginning: The weekly ad read (voiced by one of the hosts) w/ music behind it, a guest promo hit from a past episode, then the the OTNB intro (voiced and produced by the talented Jonathan Santiago), the aforementioned customized intro, the interview and the OTNB outro, which typically begins playing around 20-25 seconds before the last word is spoken.
  6. Post on MegaPhone: This step releases the episode to “wherever you get your podcasts.” Posting here includes identifying a punchy and relevant title according to our standard format, typing a short written intro (should probably be fairly similar to the audio intro, but without the fun fact of course) and then transcribing four to six of the episode’s more interesting and newsworthy excerpts with each corresponding time stamp attached (It’s usually ideal if the excerpts are somewhat evenly spaced out over the course of the episode and they should probably total somewhere between 450 and 750 words.).
  7. Post on OTNB Website: Fairly similar to the MegaPhone post. Sign into WordPress, open a previous episode and copy the template’s HTML code for use on the new WordPress post. Be sure to swap the outdated content with the new episode content (particularly the intro, excerpts and proper embed code). Grab the MegaPhone embed code from the “Podcasts” tab of MegaPhone, specifically next to the relevant episode. Add a photo from the relevant team’s or player’s Instagram or Creative Commons if need be.
  8. Update Interview Central page with the episode link you just posted: Always be sure to check the “open link in a new tab” box when adding hyperlinks to posts. The same applies to episode posts, where we link the guest’s Twitter account and her/his outlet…but this also applies to any hyperlink absolutely anywhere on the site.
  9. Share on Social Media: Should use the hashtag #TBPN (That’s our network, The Basketball Podcast Network) and end with a link. We first tweet from the @OnTheNBABeat account with the embedded MegaPhone file, getting the link from the “Share Your Episode on Twitter” link on MegaPhone. Later, we tweet the episode link as it appears on this very website. We also post the link on our Facebook page too, typically using the written intro as the copy teasing the link. The hosts also share or RT the link on their personal Twitter pages.

We very much look forward to hearing from you and will be in touch within a week of the application deadline.

Best,

Aaron and Loren