Works in progress: Willie Weinbaum

     A surprising number of people I know from college ended up doing exactly what they wanted to do in life. There is Robert Leighton, who drew cartoons for the Daily Northwestern and now draws cartoons for The New Yorker. There is Steve Albini, musical iconoclast then and now. There's Cate Plys, who never stopped writing across a spectrum of genres and publications. Not to forget myself. And then there is Willie Weinbaum, who ... well, maybe it's better if I let him explain it. Take it away, Willie:

     I admit it, Neil. 

      Like you, I’m 62, and yes, we’re dinosaurs who cranked out stories on manual typewriters and got them back from instructors with mistakes circled and annotated in red ink (at least I did) as Class of ’82 undergrads at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. 

     The internet and Google, high def and hard drives, cell phones and social media, podcasts, zooms and a helluva lot more of today’s reporting and communications tools were well beyond the horizon and my (our?) imagination, but the principles and practices impressed upon us are not outdated. 

     And like you, I often draw upon those teachings about open-mindedness, truth and fairness, ethics and compassion. As a TV producer and digital journalist for ESPN — the cable network that debuted in September 1979 as we started our sophomore year — I also have a deep appreciation of the power of teamwork, something we experienced and learned about less than a decade after Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate revelations.

     Over the last year, I’ve been privileged to participate in three in-depth group projects and none of them would have come to fruition without constant collaboration and cooperation. It might seem trite for someone to tout teamwork when covering sports, but the games, wins and losses are not what our unit’s pursuits are about.  

Willie Weinbaum (Jon Hayt/ESPN Images)

     Most recently, I was a producer/reporter with Nicole Noren and T.J. Quinn for “LISTEN,” an investigative documentary that premiered last month and remains on ESPN+ (and ESPN+ on Hulu) about the 2018 murder of track and field athlete Lauren McCluskey. Despite the University of Utah senior’s pleas for help, people and institutions repeatedly failed to listen and protect her from a man she had dated until finding out he was a violent felon on parole who had lied to her about his identity and age.

      In November, reporting colleagues Dan Murphy, John Mastroberardino and I finished a text story about the “Redskins” name and mascot that’s been eliminated from the NFL and from college teams, but is still found at lower levels: “Washington finally shed the name, but 37 high schools haven’t.” 

     And I was a co-director/producer last year with Jeff Ausiello and Lauren Stowell on “Jackie to Me,” a multi-platform series for the 75th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking the Major League Baseball color barrier.  Among the many memorable opportunities for me was a two-day trip to Chicago and New Orleans to interview Rev. Jesse Jackson and Ruby Bridges about their perspectives on Robinson’s civil rights legacy.

    Sharing challenges like going after and preparing for big “gets” and figuring out how to best tell stories — and even commiserating about disappointments — are among the rewarding aspects of what we get to do together. And I haven’t even mentioned the invaluable roles of each assignment’s editor, photographer, sound person, animator and other contributors.

    I still think of myself as a work in progress, just as I did in school. Learning on the job each day has made 28 years at ESPN and 11 before that at Major League Baseball Productions and Sports Newsatellite fly by. 

    Although for years I’ve been working mostly on subjects like safety and justice, I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to cover a game and go in the locker room where you’ll hear a classic line once in a while. 

   One that stands out from my time at Northwestern was when I was in the graduate journalism program in 1982 and the Wildcats had recently beaten Northern Illinois to end a Division I-record 34-game football losing streak (NU was 1-42-1 during our four years as undergraduates). 

      Northwestern then beat Minnesota in Evanston, for the home team’s first Big Ten victory in five years, so I asked Golden Gophers coach Joe Salem what the NU win meant for the conference. 

     He said, “It means we stink.”