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Recently we sat down with ESPN interviewing guru John Sawatsky at ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Conn., to watch a number of interviews conducted by ESPN reporters and anchors. Here is the Poynter Review Project's brief critique of the three we chose,...

For eight years, John Sawatsky has made ESPN his laboratory for deciphering the science of interviewing. A former investigative reporter, he has worked with the network's reporters, producers, anchors and other talent to put his philosophy into pract...

How does ESPN assess advertisements for its networks? And why does it sometimes reject them? The answers sometimes depend not just on the ads themselves, but on where those ads send viewers and what they find there. That issue came up late last mo...

Legendary college basketball coach Bob Knight has long done things his way, and his five years as an ESPN analyst have been no different. Knight prefers to call himself a basketball consultant rather than a member of the media, and wears sweaters lik...

ESPN.com's Jemele Hill did a very nice, tight column this week explaining how the lives of professional athletes are connected to the life and death of Trayvon Martin. Contrast that to ESPN's bouncing back and forth on whether its talent can post ...

Earlier this month, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban made an anti-gay joke at the expense of Grantland's Bill Simmons while the two were onstage in front of a large audience at a well-known sports conference -- a remark excised from a podcast record...

The rise of Jeremy Lin, the New York Knicks' Asian-American star, has been one of 2012's feel-good sports stories. But it's come with an unwelcome undercurrent: racial references by fans, columnists and TV personalities that have ranged from innocent...

There's a lot of sports talk on ESPN during weekday afternoons, and last week the Poynter Review Project consumed a steady diet of it. I began at noon, with the last hour of "The Herd," a simulcast of Colin Cowherd's radio show, and after that switch...

With the Super Bowl upcoming and the NFL playoffs in the rearview mirror, we have the time and distance necessary to examine the phenomenon of Tebowmania and, specifically, to scrutinize ESPN's role in spreading the craze during the 2011 season. T...

What was Holly Rowe's reaction when a friend texted her that she was trending on Twitter? "That can't be good." On Jan. 3, the ESPN sideline reporter had interviewed Michigan football coach Brady Hoke after the Wolverines beat Virginia Tech i...

So far, writes the Poynter Review Project, espnW is a low-risk dip of the toe by a media giant. Is the network prepared to make a bolder move to yield bigger results?

On consecutive shows in October, ESPN's newsmagazine "E:60" included interviews with subjects whose speech wasn't always easy to understand. But the network made different choices in how it presented those interviews: the words of Jamie Convey, a 10-...

There's a lot of outrage right now over ESPN's failure to report in 2003 that there were sexual abuse allegations against Syracuse assistant basketball coach Bernie Fine. We're hearing it from fans through the Poynter Review Project mailbag. And ...

Earlier this month, ESPN debuted "Unguarded," the story of Massachusetts basketball prodigy Chris Herren, whose battles with substance abuse dogged his college hoops and NBA careers. The documentary, directed by Jonathan Hock, is an unflinching, o...

ESPN was slow this week to grasp the full implications of the recent criminal indictments at Penn State University. On Saturday, news broke that a grand jury had charged former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky with 40 criminal count...

As the money in college football increases, writes the Poynter Review Project, the reasons for the audience to question ESPN's loyalty will grow -- and the network must assuage its understandable skeptics.