Art Holliday, a morning news anchor for the NBC station in St. Louis, visited the University of Missouri last week for the Centennial.  While visiting the campus, he stopped by the dorm Excellence where the residents of the fourth floor named their floor after Holliday, labeling it Holliday Hall.  Sitting in the lounge of his hall, he told of the story of his broadcasting career, beginning with freshman year in college up to today.  Although Holliday is one of the leading news anchors in the St. Louis area, he did not always want to be a man in front of the camera.  Originally attending the University of Arkansas, he had hopes of becoming a photographer with an emphasis of nature.  However, paying the out-of-state fees to attend the university added up, and they influenced him to return to his native Missouri, originally from Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis.  

Unknown to Holliday, he had stumbled into one of the top Journalism Schools in the world.  He began his television careers with one of the local news stations.  It was obvious the passion Holliday had for his job by the way he described his love for "racking up the hours" in front of the camera to develop as a better journalist.  One point Holliday emphasized in the interview was the fact that connections were one of the keys to his success in establishing his career in St. Louis.  Although he met several other students that went on to lead successful careers, including editorial jobs for The New York Times and USA Today, Holliday met two people who would turn out to be his close friends that would set him up with the only two jobs he needed to make his career a successful one.  The first friend, a couple years older than Holliday, was visiting Columbia and staying with him.  He mentioned that he had recently turned down a job in Oklahoma, and the position may still b open.  Hollday, with three weeks left in his schooling at Missouri, created a tape to send into the station almost immediately.  Two tapes later, Holliday had the job and moved to Oklahoma.  Shortly after, one of his close friends from Columbia told him of an opening in the sports section of NBC-St. Louis.  Eagerly taking the job, Holliday moved back to Webster Groves where he and his family reside today.  The only change he has made in the past 13 years was changing from a sports broadcaster to the lead morning news anchor.  

Another event taking place during the Centennial celebration was a forum about reshaping the future of sports, journalism and advocacy.  this forum featured ESPN Sportcenter anchor John Anderson, the Missouri Athletics director Mike Alden, representative from the Major League Baseball Players Association Phil Bradley, President of the NCAA Myles Brand, Vice President of sponsorship and employee communications at AT&T Jamie Butcher, ESPN writers TJ Quinn and Wright Thompson, along with an O'Melveny&Meyers LLP Lawyer, Sonja Steptoe.  At this forum they spoke about how sports have evolved over time, particularly in college sports.  Myles Brand seemed to somewhat attack the way ESPN covers college sports.  "You cover college football the exact same way you cover professional football," he said.  "You lose the part that the athletes are students competing against one another on college campuses."  He mentioned that the only sport that was well covered for college was softball, where he said ESPN showed several campuses and made it clear that they were students.  In speaking with John Anderson after the forum, it was discovered that he did not disagree with this argument.  He did however say that it was the entire commercialization of college sports, as we mentioned during the forum, that led to the belief that the coverage is too similar to professional sports coverage.  In the forum they spoke about how difficult it is with sponsorships and commercial deals becoming almost larger in college sports than professional sports to avoid turning college sports into a business much like professional sports are.

Also mentioned in the forum was how difficult it is to write for a major newspaper or website.  This is due to all of the social networking websites who provide thousands of rumors each day about college students, and because of the evolution of blogs into a major source for many of people's news.  The biggest problem is that anyone can write a blog.  Therefore, people could be reading false stories and not even be aware of it.  However, as Steptoe mentioned, many people are not very worried about reading true stories, but instead rumors and drama.

This forum was very interesting to hear both the media's side as well as the NCAA's side.  This was particularly interesting when talking about the commercialization of sports, but hearing the ESPN reporters talk about how they text players and look on their websites and Facebook acounts was very surprising.  Perhaps even more entertaining than that was seeing the president of the NCAA and the Missouri Athletic Director's reactions to these statements.  Speaking to the members of the forum after the fact was also very interesting because they were more personal and said how they really felt about the topics.  It was also really cool to meet writers for ESPN as well as an anchor of just about every reporter's dream job on Sportcenter in John Anderson.