On becoming the Editor-in-Chief of ESPN The Magazine, Overholt said, “Stunning, honestly. To be Editor-in-Chief of espnW was and is my dream job and to also be Editor-in-Chief of ESPN The Magazine, where I began my career as an editor… Well, it’s hard to even get my head around it. It’s more incredible than I could ever tell you, even with a thousand adjectives and unlimited exclamation points!”
As Editor-in-Chief, her job description involves overseeing the editorial vision, identity and direction of ESPN The Magazine and espnW. “Both groups have incredibly creative, dedicated teams working on them, so we’re already ahead of the game,” she said.
Regarding her plans for 2016, she said, “Working very closely with the other ESPN executives who were elevated to new roles at the same time — Patrick Stiegman on global content, Chad Millman digital and multimedia storytelling on ESPN.com and the ESPN App, and Ryan Spoon and Nate Ravitz with our new audience development unit. Our goal is to unify our groups in the strongest possible way, allowing our content teams to laser focus on creating the best possible stories, all while we amplify their efforts and get those stories out to every single sports fan who wants to read or watch them. My personal goal for The Magazine is to make some noise! I want fans talking about our stories like never before, sharing them everywhere — I want them to know that The Magazine, which has always been committed to doing the best immersive storytelling in the industry, will just keep getting better.”
Each day, Overholt is motivated by her desire to learn new things, as well as her curiosity. “I’m curious, I love people, and I’m also really impatient. Throw that all in a blender and you get a person who just likes to get going every day and figure out to do bigger and better things, with cool and smart people, all the time,” she said.
Most impressive about Overholt is that her proudest professional moments are not her loudest ones. “You know, I said earlier that I want to make noise with The Magazine… yet my proudest personal moments are never the loud ones. They’re the times I’ve gotten to sit with a writer to puzzle through a really complicated story, and after days or hours, there’s that moment when you look at each other and realize that yes! That’s it! We’ve figure out how to tell it, exactly the right way. Or sitting over lunch with a producer or new contributor, talking with them about what they want to work on… those moments when I realize I’m hearing someone find their voice, in a very literal way, and that I can work with them to make their new idea a reality… it sounds really corny, but that’s the stuff that means the most to me,” she elaborated.
This week marked the launch of espnW’s official website. “You know, a funny thing about espnW.com is that we never had a true homepage. We had a “News & Commentary” feed of stories that ended up becoming our default homepage, but it never represented the full mix of columns, features, immersive sports coverage, lifestyle and video series that the espnW team actually creates. If you knew us well, you could find it all. But with today’s refresh, you’ll find that espnW.com now displays the full range of who we are, for our community of women who love sports. We’ve also made it much clearer and easy to discover and navigate to all our content, organized into four clear channels: “Sports,” where you can navigate sport by sport according to what you’re a fan of; “Voices,” where you can read all our columnists, hear our pod-casts, and dip into personal essays, athlete first-persons and more; “Life/Style,” where women will find all the athlete-inspired motivation they need to live an athletically-minded life; and “Culture,” where our sports business and espnW Women+ Sports Summit content lives alongside our global stories, film series, pop culture coverage, and LGBTQ inclusion coverage,” she said.
For her ESPN readers and reading audience, Overholt concluded, “It has never been more fun to be a sports fan, and there has never been a greater time to live an athlete-inspired or sports-minded life. Sports matters, in so many ways, from the lessons it teaches us all as we grow up playing, to the ways it knits together families and communities once we’re grown. I’m so excited to do what I do, and hope readers and fans will continue letting us know what stories thrill and move them, get them riled up and make them keep clamoring for more. We want to be the best in the business, and our fans are the ones who continually help us define what that means. So keep it coming!”
