By Kohl Wolfe
Jackson Wagner is the Assistant Director of Communications for Griz Volleyball, Men’s Basketball, Cross Country, and Track & Field, a position he’s held since 2022. He is responsible for creating content for all of the social pages related to these sports, as well as creating content for UM’s Sports Information Department. A graduate of UM’s Journalism department, Wagner previously worked as a sports reporter for the Montana Kaimin before graduating.
University of Montana Kohl Wolfe interviewed Wagner about social media and best practices working in sports media and what follows is a transcript of their conversation.
Q: How, if at all, do you believe sports social media differs from the regular types of social media we see on an everyday basis? Do you believe that it functions inherently differently, or is it the same?
A: I believe that sports social media does differ from the regular types of social media. There are a lot of takeaways that you can use from the day-to-day content that is created, but to me sports socials exist in a bubble on their own. There are a lot of things that have become common in sports social media. If you check the page of any professional or collegiate sports team, you will see an increase in graphic design, cinematic videos, and highly stylized “media day” type photos. I do think it functions differently from general social media, especially in my role communicating on behalf of a program. There is a certain rhythm that comes with posting as a sports account, and my general workflow is similar on a week-to-week basis. There are different styles and voices that you can use when running an account, but I like to think that sports stays away from a lot of the shock-factor, click-bait style posts that are becoming more common in general.
Q: In what ways do you believe social platforms can be used to strengthen the reporting you do?
A: I think that social platforms can often allow you to connect more with the subjects that you are working with on a daily basis. By running our accounts, I’m able to speak with student-athletes about what they like to see from our pages and can sometimes cater content around how it will appear on social media. I also use my social posts in a lot of my stories, either embedding posts directly into our website to display as you read or just to pull information that I gained through social media and expand upon it in a story.
Q: In what ways, if at all, do you think it hurts your reporting?
A: I do think that sometimes the focus on socials and the day-to-day grind of making sure that content is coming out can take time away from reporting on longer, more in-depth stories. One of my passions is feature writing, and I started this job hoping to write a long profile on all the freshmen and newcomers on my teams. The focus on social media, and creating content specifically for those channels, has taken away the time I need to do that. For example, instead of feature stories with our men’s basketball team we created interview-style videos with fellow players on the team that go out only on our social channels.
Q: In the time from when you started your job until now, how have you seen the landscape of sports social media change? You’ve said before that it’s becoming an increasingly important part of the job. Why do you think that is?
A: I touched on this before, but I think there is a constant battle for being on the forefront of college world in terms of videos, photos, and graphics. It’s becoming increasingly important to be able to promote your athletes on these channels and collaborate with them to build a brand for themselves. When I started, I viewed social media primarily as a place to get the work that I was doing in terms of stories out for the public to see, but I didn’t do much beyond that. We use the word “content creators” a lot and it can be pretty vague, but that to me has become the goal of the job. We are trying to create content that gets our student-athletes in front of more eyes and makes them look as good as possible. I spend more time creating graphics and editing photos now than I ever did when I first got into this role, and it just naturally takes time away from writing and reporting.
Q: In a world where people in athletics are heavily trained in how to deal with the media, do you ever find it difficult to break the barriers between reporter and athlete/coach?
A: We do put an emphasis on teaching student-athletes how best to interact with the media. I think that can lead to a lot of “coach speak” and boring answers, but I try to do whatever I can to get student-athletes and coaches in front of anyone that wants to speak with them. One of my favorite stories that I ever worked on covered the injury of Griz quarterback Reese Phillips. I wrote for the Montana Kaimin at the time, but Reese and Griz Athletics gave me great access at his home and it allowed me to go more in-depth.
It depends on the athlete, and the situation, but I view any opportunity to speak with the media for a story as a positive thing for our athletes. They can learn a lot from the experience, and I think it helps them in real-life situations like job interviews that they will encounter once their playing careers are done. That said, it can be difficult with the busy schedules of all involved to set up even a quick 10-minute interview following practices sometimes.
Q: What’s the hardest part of working on the social platforms?
A: I think the hardest part is remaining creative on a day-to-day basis, and managing the different tones that I want to set with each sport. I am creating and posting different content for our men’s basketball team than I am for our women’s cross country team, for example. I want to always be posting the best content that I can and to be doing things that are worthwhile, but with the demands of posting on a near daily basis it can be difficult to find inspiration. I recently saw a post that said it’s odd to be expected to come up with creative, engaging posts on a daily basis that will essentially be forgotten in 24 hours. It’s a sentiment that I agree with for the most part. You are constantly striving to make the best product, but the time restraints of the job and the attention span of the audience are both shrinking.
Q: What’s the easiest part?
A: I think the easiest part for me is just having good photos and videos to post from our creative team. We are lucky to have plenty of photographers that are extremely talented at the University of Montana, so there are a lot of times where I can just get up a pretty basic post with some photos that takes little effort on my end but is still highly impactful for our student-athletes.
Q: As social media platforms become increasingly toxic, how do you work to protect the athletes you work with? Are there platforms where those negative interactions happen more?
A: This is increasingly a concern of mine, particularly on the men’s basketball pages where there are more eyes on the content. I do my best to block any accounts that only exist to troll our team and our student-athletes, and encourage our players to do their best to tune it out and block any negative comments that come their way. I think there is a place, particularly on our pages, for criticism. I don’t think there is any place for hateful speech, which unfortunately occurs often.
For our pages, Twitter (X) can be extremely toxic, particularly in bigger games for us that have more attention from the sports betting community. When our men’s basketball team played at Houston last year, for example, we had a lot of extremely hateful comments. It was a game against one of the top teams in the country, and one that we were expected to lose, but because our players didn’t hit a prop bet and we didn’t cover the spread, we had a lot of no-name accounts responding to our score graphics and recap story.
I’ve heard from our student-athletes that Instagram is becoming increasingly negative, and several of our men’s basketball players have showed me shocking DM’s that they’ve received. I do my best to remove any types of comments like these from our pages, and try to be wary of the situation in the game when posting.
Q: Do your thoughts/responsibilities on producing content change at all based on the different sports you cover? How differently does a sports page with a high following like basketball team’s operate compared to a page with a much smaller following like the Track team? How different are those interactions?
A: I do think my thought process is different depending on the sport, which I touched a bit on earlier, but I don’t view my responsibilities any differently. I want to be posting the same amount of content at the same quality level for all of my sports, regardless of the audience size. In my mind, they should operate the exact same way. There is a slight difference in what type of content I am going for on each page. I think part of it depends on the success of the team and what you are able to highlight. Track and field has so many athletes competing, and a big part of what the coaching staff and student-athletes want is personalized graphics for personal-best performances. I end up making a lot of these, and it takes up a good portion of my coverage for each meet, but it’s what they want. Basketball, on the other hand, gets far less of that type of content. I’m focused more on highlights and photos for basketball, and getting the feel of what it’s like to be inside the gym out to the fans. There are slight differences in my approach for all three of my sports.
Q: How do you balance social media being a tool for good rather than something that can, in many ways, maximize harm if incorrect information is spread? What advice would you give to minimize the negative affects social platforms can bring?
A: I think my advice for this is just to remain positive with what you are posting. I know it can be trendy to try to “dunk” on other teams through social media and to create some funny content at others’ expense, but I generally try to avoid that. My goal is always to share highlights and accomplishments through our social channels, and to use it to celebrate the athletes. There are times where I try to avoid posting if I think it will be damaging. In the men’s basketball championship game when things started to go against them, I posted a highlight video that was quickly the subject of a lot of online hate. I removed the highlight, and did minimal posting for the next few days because everything was being received with aggression. I think to avoid the harm of incorrect information, I just try my best to double- and triple-check all of the facts that I am posting from our accounts.
Q: What’s your favorite part of your job? Why? Do you think that will change as the relationship between social media and journalism evolves?
A: I think the favorite part of my job is seeing a positive reaction to something that I’ve done to impact a student-athlete. Our men’s javelin thrower Evan Todd is a three-time Big Sky Champion, and I was able to photograph and create graphics for him over the final two years of his career. He and I had a great relationship and he was so kind in thanking me for my work, and I felt in those moments that even if it is just a passing thing with social media, it does make a difference in the lives of the people that I am covering.
Q: Finally, is there anything I didn’t ask that you would want me or anyone else to know about? Anything important that you’re passionate about that I missed?
A: I can’t think of anything that you didn’t ask. I think for me, as someone who grew up in Montana as a Griz fan, the chance to represent the school and really be the public voice of some of the athletic teams is so meaningful. I would want to do well in any job that I held in life, but it means a bit more when you are doing something that you care deeply about. It can be a bit of a grind sometimes, but I’m always so thankful that I get to be a part of Griz Athletics.
This Q&A is part of a series created by students in Courtney Cowgill’s Social Media and Audience Engagement course at the University of Montana School of Journalism. Students sought out creatives who are doing social media for good to offer tips and insights into the ever-evolving landscape of social media.
Montana Journalism 