Thank you, Carol Liebler

A tribute to my grad school advisor and mentor

I wouldn’t be writing this if it wasn’t for Dr. Carol Liebler. 

No need to mince words. Like Chuck Pollock before her, Carol would hate it if I didn’t get to the point. She’s left enough comments on papers of mine over the years saying as much. 

But it’s true. I wouldn’t be a professor, celebrating our third graduating cohort of grad students this weekend at St. Bonaventure, without her. I wouldn’t be writing under the name Sports Media Guy without her. 

A life lived in journalism is one that's inextricably linked to certain people. For me, one of those people was Carol Liebler, my grad school advisor, colleague and friend, who is retiring from Syracuse University after a distinguished career as a professor and a scholar. 

Carol and I having a drink and tapas together in Barcelona during IACS 2023. There are few joys better than having drinks in Barcelona with your grad school advisor.

She was the director of the Media Studies program at the Newhouse School in 2009 when I started grad school, not fully sure of where I was going or what I wanted to do. She was also the director of the doctoral program at Newhouse when I was accepted, allowing me to continue grad school without having to uproot my young family. She was the advisor for my master’s thesis and my dissertation. 

My first scholarly publication was with her. In 2015, we published a study in the International Journal of Communication and Sport about the Manti Te’o story and how sports journalists engaged in paradigm repair to explain how so many reporters were so fooled by the story. 

But as I think back over the past 16 years, what strikes me is how a series of conversations we had shaped this second career of mine. 

In my second semester of grad school, I took her Com 601 class, qualitative methods. In that class, she said I should look up the roles and routines literature in media sociology. Woah. There’s a whole line of research that looks at how journalists do their jobs? And, at the time, there was an emerging line of research into how that was changing in the new digital and social age? How perfect for a former sports journalist looking for a lens through which to study journalism and newspapers! 

At the end of that class, we did a scholar-to-scholar poster session. It was perfect training for future conferences. I don’t remember what I did my paper on that semester, but I know it had something to do with interviewing reporters about how their jobs were changing. I know this because I have a vivid memory if sitting in front of the poster when Carol came down and sat next to me. We were sitting on a table in front of my poster when I said that I think this is what I wanted my thesis to be. She agreed that it was a perfect idea. 

That thesis turned the research focus for my doctoral program. And to the email that changed my life. 

As I started getting ready to do my dissertation, I was indecisive about whether I wanted to focus on the changes happening to the practice of sports journalism or whether I should broaden it to all journalism. My thinking was that writing about all journalism would give my research and my work a wider potential audience and, given the fact that I was going to be on the job market that fall, make me a candidate to a wider audience of schools. I emailed a jumbled mess of thoughts about this to Carol in June of 2013.

In an email I’ve saved all these years, Carol wrote:

My initial reaction is you should do sports.  You're a sports guy. It's your passion. You're at Newhouse and we're synonymous with sports.  … You could become the go-to guy on sports news in the digital era!

I wouldn’t say I’ve hit the last part of her email. But she was right. She was always right. Sports journalism was where my heart was at, it was what I knew best. It was also a subtle lesson to trust yourself and do the work you care about rather than trying to do what you think other people think you should do. It’s the academic version of betting on yourself. 

That was the kind of professor Carol was, to me and to a generation of students. She met you where you were. She let you follow your academic passion while still keeping you focused. She let you do the type of work you wanted to, rather than forcing you to follow her own research agenda (something that is not uncommon in grad school). She cared about you and those close to you. She taught me how to be a scholar, empowering me to embrace that word and that identity. 

And this doesn’t even get into her own career as a scholar, her incredible work on media coverage of missing children and women and the intersection of gender, race and ethnicity. 

You know how when you go to Google Scholar and the little tagline under the search bar says “Stand on the shoulders of giants”?

Carol Liebler is a giant in the field of mass communication research.I’m lucky to call her a friend and a mentor. 

And I wouldn’t have this platform named Sports Media Guy had it not been for her.