By Justin Paprocki, Assistant Director of Student Niner Media Advising and Support
Photo by Jacob Pentecost, Student Niner Media Intern
As he says now, Joe Posnanski wasn’t sure what he wanted to do in life when he first stepped into the newsroom of the The Forty-Niner Times (now the Niner Times). After a failed stint as an accounting major, Posnanski was a bit of a “lost soul,” he says. He knew he liked sports and writing, so he was interested in any reporting opportunities the paper might offer. Apparently, the staff was a little short handed; he was immediately named the sports editor. It was just the start of his journey to becoming a bestselling author and acclaimed sports writer. “Everything that my life was about to become began here,” he told students and alumni at a speaking event Feb. 6 on campus.
Posnanski has been named National Sportswriter of the Year by five different organizations. He has published seven books, including Why We Love Baseball, The Baseball 100 and Paterno. He said he finished writing his eighth book, Why We Love Football, the night before his speaking engagement in the Popp Martin Student Union.
He graduated from UNC Charlotte in 1989 with an English major. He served as the Forty-Niner Times’ sports editor for two years–not only writing and editing stories but laying out each page by hand. He credits longtime student media adviser Wayne Maikranz and former Charlotte sports information director Mark Colone (currently a senior director of development) as being his mentors during his college days. “They taught me how to be a sports writer,” he said.
He recalled some hard lessons learned here; how a bad joke about the pep band in a column resulted in a particularly nasty piece of hate mail that made him realize to be more mindful of those you critique. But his time on campus gave him the confidence and direction he needed. “It’s about your imagination, it’s about your effort,” he told students. “It’s about how much you are willing to do. There’s no one stopping you from being the person you want to be.”
Read the latest from Posnanski on his blog.