What is your current job?
I'm currently a contributing writer for ESPN, focusing on features. I'm also at work on a book. And I've got a day job running content marketing for a startup based in the Bay Area.
I also have a day job running content marketing for a startup based in the Bay Area.
What was your first byline?
I started out local, doing sports writing for outlets like Oaklandside, SF Gate, and San Francisco Chronicle. (I live in the Bay Area.) My first byline was in The Bold Italic, a digital magazine (now defunct, I think) based out of S.F. My first national byline was with The Ringer.
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What was your first real job in journalism?
I have never had a real job in journalism! I've always plied this trade part-time, at nights and on the weekends. I've edited and written, but it's all been in whatever pockets of time I could squirrel from my employer or from my other responsibilities. That I've never had a real job in journalism is not for lack of trying, mind, but I digress.
How did you get it?
When it comes to "real jobs" on the journalism side, I have been a contributor at a number of places, including ESPN and formerly at The Ringer. I got those gigs the old fashioned way, I think, by pitching my editor several times, writing a few things that did well, turning in my drafts on time, earning a degree of trust there, etc.
As for content marketing, it's not a bad way to pay the rent. I oversee a small team that writes white papers and newsletters, runs a podcast, manages PR, social, that kind of thing. I came to it via ghostwriting—the founder who eventually brought me on to this marketing team I'm now a part of was one of my clients—which I came to out of desperation. Initially out of college I had dreams of writing fiction. Then I was rejected from every MFA program I applied to. I taught first grade for a few years, then got a job in tech, didn't like it, and cast desperately about for a way out. Found an agency that was hiring ghostwriters. Got the gig, then opened up my own little ghostwriting practice a year or so later.
What advice do you have for people looking to break into journalism?
I have not broken in in the traditional sense, seeing as how I've never had a staff writing job or anything—the dream!—but I have found a bit of success freelancing, I suppose, and to that end all I can say is it pays to keep working it. As in: to keep pitching, keep reading, keep studying, keep practicing, keep trying to write better and more precise stuff. I do feel I've gotten better at this over 10 years or so of tending to it, and to the extent that that's true it's probably because of practice and persistence and reading widely. Getting better and having the work to prove that I'm a writer editors can feel alright commissioning work to has led to more work.
So that's what I'd say: focus on the writing. Whatever assignment is before you. Make it great; make it true. As best you can, at any rate.
The work is also something you can control, which makes it a better thing to spend your mental energy on than, say, worrying about whether this or that editor or outlet will reply to your email or whether you have a big enough social platform or how foreboding and long is the road between where you sit now and where you want to be. Or maybe another way of putting it is: proceed one piece at a time. And practice all the time! I've decided to place my faith that even in a world with dwindling job prospects for writers where people don't read and what space people do make for reading is complicated by the flotsam of AI slop, good work will still rise to the top, and there will remain opportunities for people willing to dedicate themselves to producing good true work.
Find Dan on BlueSky.