Great talk with ESPN’s Kevin Negandhi on Thursday’s episode of Crossing Broadcast.

The Phoenixville native and Temple alumnus is a SportsCenter anchor who also appears on NFL Live, Baseball Tonight, and a number of other shows. We talked about the Eagles, Phillies, and Philadelphia sports fandom, but also got into the current state of the television business, ESPN’s content philosophy, and the opportunities Gen Z now has when entering the industry.

Here’s a portion of the conversation:

Crossing Broadcast: The thing that was interesting to me, when we were doing sports at channel 3, was how do we keep up with the times? They’d give us 1:45 on the CW at 10 p.m., maybe two minutes at 11 o’clock, and I’m sitting here thinking, how do we create a show for people who have already seen these highlights? They’ve seen it on their phone. It’s a digital world now. What’s your philosophy and ESPN’s philosophy on that, just reconciling the thought that things are different now?

Kevin Negandhi: 100% right. No one’s just sitting there to watch SportsCenter for highlights, because you can just pick up your phone. What’s cutting through? What’s the big story? How is it translating? That’s kind of how we view things from 30,000 feet. What are people talking about? Do we get new sound coming in? To me, what’s relevant to the audience is what’s new, and then do we have a twist on how we view it? That’s mixed in with a lot of opinion makers, especially in that 6 o’clock window. (Tuesday), we did an ‘about last night’ thing with the Bengals, and everybody had seen the Bengals/Commanders game, but we do a ‘here are three plays you may have missed’ and then Dan Orlovsky comes in with, ‘hey, what’s wrong with the Bengals now moving forward?’ How do we move the story forward? I think that’s the challenge for local.

CB: ‘Advancing the story,’ as we used to say.

Negandhi: Yeah, exactly, but doing it in a way that’s organic and authentic and relatable to the audience is the challenge. You find viral moments, some interviews, things you want to pull out, and ‘this just happened’ as well. This is going to be the topic tomorrow when you’re hanging out at the office with your buddies, or you’re texting with your friends. That’s kind of what we’re trying to do now, and make it entertaining and relatable. I think now more than ever you’re going to see more personality at ESPN because it’s not so much the brand, it’s about ‘can I connect with the person who is watching TV?’, because when you and I grew up, we connected to the people who were presenting.

CB: I had the privilege of growing up during the Stuart Scott era and waking up with people like him every morning and hearing those famous calls. ‘Carlos Delgado, Del-got-it!’ ‘Cool as the other side of the pillow.’ It felt like you were connecting to a personality. But it’s funny, because the one thing you don’t want to be is the old man complaining about the kids, after being a kid who hated the old men complaining about you, yet part of me is annoyed because when I got out of school, I went to television market #100-whatever we were, paid my dues on the overnight shift, made my $26,300, and now you’ve got kids coming out of Temple going right to the TV stations in Philly.

Negandhi: It’s crazy.

CB: Yeah, but I’m also happy for them because I guess it’s not as rigid of a path to get into the industry. There’s one kid who works at PhillyVoice now (Sixers Adam), who came straight out of Temple because he had a great Twitter account and just knew what he was talking about.

Negandhi: That’s it, right? And the training is different. It’s not linear TV only. My first job was market #199. I left Philly out of Temple and I was making $15,000, three months later I got promoted to sports director, now it’s $15,500 (laughs).

CB: What was #199, something like Presque Isle Maine?

Negandhi: (laughing) Kirksville, Missouri! And I lived in the satellite town of Ottumwa, Iowa and I lived on the hill and down below was a pig farm, a slaughterhouse and you could smell the aroma every night of burning pigs, oh my god, the worst in the world. But I tell you what, I needed to make those mistakes. I lived in the middle of Mennonite country. I needed to screw up every day. I wanted to get to Philly, and I had an opportunity to get to New York when I was 25 and I wanted that job badly. Thank God I didn’t get that job because I wasn’t ready. I would had been eviscerated decades ago. I needed to go in these small markets and learn every single thing, learn how to make those mistakes. And I’ll add one other thing too – 20 years ago, the salaries were completely different in those big markets, compared to what is is now. Especially in sports, many of these kids out of college are getting the opportunity because out of college they don’t have to worry about paying these young kids (what they used to). Good for them, they get the experience, but the ceiling is no longer here (hand raising motion), it’s down here (lowering hand) because that’s just the way TV is locally. It’s tough to survive.

CB: Same in radio. Common theme there is people aren’t paying Angelo Cataldi money anymore. They’re not paying Mike Missanelli and Howard Eskin money of 1997. Which is why, again, multiple Temple kids come straight out of school and they’re interns, to board ops, to producers, to third mic, and as much as I hate that on one hand, because I would have loved to have that opportunity, you gotta be happy for them that they have something that we did not. As much as I love telling the stories of graveyard shift in Augusta, Georgia, I would have loved to go straight from Morgantown to Pittsburgh and work for KDKA.

Negandhi: Absolutely. And I’ll add one other thing. We’ve talked extensively about Temple kids. The education is completely different. The training is completely different. That’s props to Temple and the pipeline into Philadelphia. Everywhere you go and every newsroom I’d say 50% are Temple grads. Every newsroom in Philadelphia you’re going to make connections, and that’s the reason why you go to a university like that. They’re gonna train you the right way and then you have the connections if you want to stay in that market. We’re lucky, but some of these high schools now have better studios than I had at my first job. Phoenixville has a TV show and I walk in and I’m like, ‘this studio is awesome’ (laughs). The training is much more advanced. I did a 12-year-old’s podcast hit recently, and I was thinking, my goodness, if I had this when I was 12, (it would be great). They’re getting advanced training now that we never got growing up.

Here’s the full interview: