MSU alumni cover Spartan Athletics for Michigan’s leading newspapers

<p>MSU alumni <a href="https://twitter.com/chrissolari">Chris Solari</a> and Matt <a href="https://twitter.com/mattcharboneau">Charboneau</a> cover Spartan sports for the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News, respectively. They join me on MSU Today to talk about their backgrounds in journalism, why they chose MSU for college, and how their time at MSU prepared them for their field.</p><p> </p><p>They talk about the state and future of sports journalism and intercollegiate athletics and the challenges and opportunities ahead for both. And they preview the coming seasons for MSU football and men’s basketball.</p><p> </p><p><strong><em>Conversation Highlights</em></strong>:</p><p> </p><p>(9:25) – “This place had the largest college newspaper in the country. That meant something. Being the editor in chief of the State News isn’t something a lot of people get to do. And at that level and in that time of my life and where the newspaper industry was, that meant a lot.”</p><p> </p><p>(14:59) – “The bad thing about our job is that it takes the sports fan out of you.”</p><p> </p><p>(17:43) – “You get more of a connection with the people as opposed to an institution or a team.”</p><p> </p><p>(18:15) – “Being an alum and having come through and having the background the journalism program provided us make you want to be sure you’re doing things the right way. And you want your alma mater to be doing things the right way, and you sometimes want to hold them to a higher standard.”</p><p> </p><p>(22:41) – “It has changed so dramatically or substantially in the sense that the idea of writing for tomorrow doesn’t exist anymore. Everything is immediate.”</p><p> </p><p> (28:23) – “That was the moment I realized things had changed. We can now compete in the immediacy realm with television and radio, which we never could before that.”     </p><p> </p><p>(34:04) – “Journalism is not dying. It takes money to do good, deep investigative journalism. You either pay for journalism being an important part of society or you don’t. So