One of the best writers and bloggers out there, if not busiest, is Michael David Smith. Smith writes regularly for FanHouse, Pro Football Talk, the New York Sun, Football Outsiders and FoxSports.com. He has also written about football for the New York Times, the Orange County Register, Deadspin, The New Republic Online and ESPN the Magazine, and he appears regularly on WSCR radio in Chicago. He has contributed to several books, including the annual Pro Football Prospectus. His weekly feature, Every Play Counts, was described by the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix as “packing more game analysis into a single column than many beat writers display over a full season,” and in August SI.com named him one of its 10 notable sports media people of the month. Smith is a graduate of the University of Illinois and lives in Chicago with his wife, a lawyer. Somehow I was lucky enough to pull MDS away from one of his several gigs to answer some questions about himself and his thoughts on the industry. Our interview follows.
1. Take us through your career path. When did you start writing about sports and how and when did you get hooked up with all your current gigs?
I started writing at the Daily Illini, the student newspaper at the University of Illinois, during my freshman year there, 1995. I hardly ever wrote about sports, though: The football team was horrible, the basketball team was mediocre and I was more into writing news and feature stories. I worked there all four years I was in college and was the editor in chief my senior year, and it was a great experience.
Although I wasn’t on the sports staff at the student paper, I did, during my junior year, start sending around a weekly e-mail to my friends about my thoughts on the NFL. I really don’t know what inspired me to do that, and I’m sure a large portion of my friends just deleted the e-mail every week without reading it, but some people told me they really liked it, and I knew writing about the NFL was something I wanted to do. At that time, though, I thought it would require the traditional journalism career path: You take a job at a small paper covering high school sports or something, and you work your way up. I didn’t find that particularly appealing.
Longtime readers of the site are probably familiar with 
I assume that most of you who are reading this are pretty hard core sports fans just like me. Probably somewhere along the line you had a dream of working in sports, that is, if you couldn’t make it as an athlete. With that in mind, I had a conversation with Adam Schefter who is the lead reporter and information man for the NFL Network, and a writer for NFL.com. Adam is a former President of the Pro Football Writers of America, has authored three books, and covered the Broncos for 15 seasons. Schefter brings some of the best NFL information to the forefront on a daily basis, and he breaks some of the biggest stories in the business. I thought it would be cool to find out how Adam got to where he is today, and what it’s like to scoop the competition on several key NFL stories. Our order of conversation includes:
Ben Maller is the founder of the stellar sports gossip site
Chuck Giampa is an insurance broker and insurance consultant in Nevada, and has been a boxing judge since 1984. In his incredibly accomplished career, Giampa has judged around 2,500 fights, 114 of which have been world title fights. He was one of the judges for some of the most notable fights in recent history, including the Tyson/Holyfield “Bite Fight,” and the “Fan Man” fight at Caesar’s Palace. Chuck was privileged to be one of the three ringside judges on Saturday for De La Hoya vs. Mayweather, and
So one of my favorite sites out there is 