People are passionate about their local sports teams and they look to their daily newspapers to provide in-depth coverage of the games, the players and their coaches. Readers also expect national sports coverage, and a discerning editor has to strike a balance between the two. To learn more about the person responsible for the Times Union’s sports section, I recently interviewed Sports Editor Pete Iorizzo.
Iorizzo oversees a staff of five while also writing news and opinion columns on sports for the Times Union.
Q: Where are you from?
A: I grew up in New Jersey.
Q: Where did you go to school?
A: I went to Syracuse University.
Q: How did you come to the Times Union?
A: While working in Idaho, I was applying for a job at another paper. After calling the sports editor at the Syracuse paper, where I previously interned and running the job past him, he told me about an opening at the Times Union.
Q: How long have you been at the Times Union? And what jobs have you held here?
A: I started out as the Siena men’s basketball beat reporter. Then I went to the features department, before returning to the sports department as a reporter. Then I got my current job as Sports Editor.
Q: What are your job responsibilities at the TU?
A: I’m in charge of making sure the print sports section goes out. I also work with our digital team to publish sports content on timesunion.com.
Q: How did you get into the field of journalism?
A: Growing up my dad always had tickets to big sporting events. We had season tickets to the Jets. I even watched all eight home games when they went 1-15 [1996]. When I went to college, it just seemed right.
Q: Describe a typical work day.
A: I get here around 9 and work with our team to plan the next day’s paper — figuring out what we are going to include in the sports section, doing the budget.
Q: What do you like most about your job?
A: I enjoy being able to put together what goes out in our paper.
Q: With all the high schools in the area how do you balance coverage?
A: We try and hit the big schools where we have a lot of readers, but it all depends on how important the game is.
Q: Let’s say it’s a tie game at “The Joe, ” and it’s heading into extras. What do you do if you’re not going to make the deadline? Can you hold the press?
A: Thankfully it doesn’t happen often, but when it does there’re a few different things we can do. If it’s a big game we can see about pushing the deadline back 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes. After that, it gets a little harder to get 60,000 papers on people’s doorsteps. We can talk with the people in the back at the press and see what they can do to help, but if we aren’t going to get a story on we’ll quickly see what we can get off the wires. We wouldn’t run a story if the game wasn’t over. Thankfully we’ve got a great team of reporters here that communicate with the desk about the status of their game, and if they think it’s going to be hard to make a deadline.
Q: if you could cover any sport 365 days a year what would it be.
A: If I were younger I’d say a hockey team, I like the NHL. Now it would probably be college basketball.
Q: What do you like to do outside of the office?
A: Well, I’ve got a 2-year-old son. So much of my free time is spent with him.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
