![\"John](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/Images\/Bates_Magazine\/2008-spring\/Hassan0539_cropped.jpg\")
John Hassan \u201982 pauses during a busy day at ESPN\u2019s campus in Bristol, Conn., where 27 satellite dishes take in more than 40,000 feeds per year. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.<\/p><\/div>\n
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Blowups of ESPN The Magazine covers hang around Hassan\u2019s office on the 64-acre ESPN campus in Bristol, Conn. On one wall, a Ramones poster shares space with a black-and-white photograph of Carl Yastrzemski waving goodbye to the Fenway faithful. During our conversation, Hassan\u2019s bright blue eyes frequently dart to SportsCenter playing silently over my shoulder. He is usefully restless, quick, and sharp \u2014 you know it\u2019s his job not to miss anything. Hired by ESPN The Magazine a decade ago as a senior editor, Hassan emigrated off the masthead in 2005 to his current job helping to integrate ESPN\u2019s content across print, Web, and broadcast outlets. Whether you call it integrated marketing or convergence journalism, two industry buzz phrases, Hassan\u2019s work has one goal: \u201cto extend the brand across all of these platforms so each medium reinforces the others.\u201d<\/p>\n
In seeking this synergy, ESPN has the same personalities \u2014 \u201cbrands on their own,\u201d Hassan says \u2014 appear in those various outlets. For example, in the magazine and online, the ESPN Radio show Mike & Mike has a presence, thanks to Hassan. Then there\u2019s the \u201cGreatest Highlight\u201d project. \u201cThrough an ESPN.com poll, SportsCenter viewers voted for the greatest sports highlight of all time,\u201d he explains. \u201cWe coordinated the polls and brackets for a countdown on TV and ESPN.com.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hassan is the kind of all-around sports enthusiast you might find editing a sports almanac (which he once did). Growing up in Holyoke, Mass., his favorite athletes came from both the Boston sports world and, importantly, beyond. The Yankees\u2019 Don Mattingly, for example, \u201cshowed me that hating the other team was just stupid,\u201d explains Hassan. \u201cI loved Don Mattingly. Everything that I found out about him, I liked. It just made no sense to me to hate him and his team.\u201d Hassan has carried the sentiment forward. \u201cAt ESPN, we cheer for good stories.\u201d<\/p>\n
With a Bates degree in English \u2014 his senior thesis was on the lyrics of the Beatles \u2014 Hassan began his journey through the publishing business, initially on the advertising side. He worked at Yankee Magazine after classmate J.D. Hale \u201982, scion of longtime editor Judson Hale Sr. and now the company\u2019s publisher, gave him a call about a residency program. Then, at the acclaimed but short-lived New England Monthly, he sold advertising for founding editor Dan Okrent.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was taught how to sell ads, and taught how to sell,\u201d Hassan says. \u201cIt\u2019s a tremendous skill that I thank the Lord I was given, because the rest of your life you\u2019re selling yourself or your idea.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sensing I wasn\u2019t sold, he rephrased it. \u201cYou need to know how to transfer your enthusiasm for something over to other people. It\u2019s an invaluable skill. Everyone can say they\u2019re above it, but everybody does it.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the early 1990s, Hassan again worked for Okrent as marketing director for Okrent\u2019s invention, Rotisserie baseball, a job that evaporated as Rotisserie was overtaken by generic fantasy baseball. (Hassan jokes that his biggest accomplishment was getting The New York Times to capitalize \u201cR\u201d in Rotisserie.)<\/p>\n
A lot of freelance hustling ensued \u2014 like writing album liner notes for Columbia records and projects for People and Esquire \u2014 as Hassan tried to catch up in the editorial world. \u201cThat was a good time for me,\u201d he says. \u201cI found out what I was made of, I found out what I was willing to do. I was infused with the attitude of always trying to find the best way to spend my time.\u201d<\/p>\n
A phone call from classmate Jeff Melvin \u201982, an executive at Information Please Sports Almanac publisher Inso Corp., led to Hassan\u2019s editing the almanac just as ESPN was branding the publication. In the \u201cmost beautiful piece of timing,\u201d ESPN announced plans to start a magazine just as Hassan completed the 1998 book. He quickly got an interview for a job at the magazine.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe day of the interview, we got five boxes of the new almanac. So I go down to Manhattan and I push the almanac across the desk to John Papanek,\u201d the former Sports Illustrated managing editor who helped launch ESPN The Magazine. Hassan pushes a copy across the desk to me like he did almost 10 years ago.<\/p>\n
Hassan\u2019s job change in 2005 reflects today\u2019s different media environment. When ESPN The Magazine was launched in 1998, one major goal \u2014 besides starting a sports magazine \u2014 was to connect the magazine back to the network. \u201cWe had to remember that people would expect this magazine to reflect what they liked about those four letters,\u201d says Hassan.<\/p>\n
Ten years later, that mission has many more fronts. \u201cPeople expect to get their ESPN, be it scores, highlights or analysis, from their TV, computer, magazine, radio, cell phone, BlackBerry, and iPod Touch,\u201d he says. \u201cNot to mention from the screen facing you in the back seat of a New York City taxi.\u201d<\/p>\n
By Joshua Friedman<\/em><\/p>\n Joshua Friedman is a freelance writer living in Newton, Mass.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" John Hassan \u201982, senior deputy editor at ESPN.com, looks like a genial…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,7,224],"tags":[10856,1891,10772,3271,3355,11047,10777,10773],"class_list":["post-3347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-life","category-alumni","category-society-culture","tag-bates-magazine","tag-business","tag-clubs","tag-english6","tag-espn","tag-finance","tag-marketing","tag-networks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3347"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":62722,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3347\/revisions\/62722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}