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How Does ESPN’s Cover Story Team Adjust Its Storytelling Techniques Amidst A Pandemic?

Accounting for COVID-19's protocols was just one big factor in documenting LaMelo Ball's journey to the NBA Draft, SVP Alison Overholt says

The latest multi-platform ESPN Cover Story on LaMelo Ball debuted today. In “The Mystery Of LaMelo Ball,” ESPN.com senior writer Tim Keown profiled the youngest basketball star of the Ball family, giving fans unprecedented access to the player to watch during this year’s NBA Draft; the NBA Draft Lottery airs tonight (8:30 ET, ESPN).

Front Row asked ESPN Senior Vice President, Multiplatform Storytelling and Journalism, Alison Overholt, about how this Cover Story unfolded amidst a pandemic.

Cover Story features are multi-platform stories told with very involved inside access. How did you manage to get that access during the pandemic? ​
The team began working on this long before the pandemic — to give you some 2020 perspective. When we first considered an ESPN Cover Story on LaMelo Ball, he was playing in Australia, and our greatest concern was the wildfires raging down there back in January.

We had safety concerns about sending anyone into that situation. We wondered whether the season there would continue given the fires, and we thought the wildfires would be the definitive news story of the year (!). And we wondered whether footage captured in that moment would be too easily identified with that moment in time if this piece were to run months later during the NBA Draft. This story has taken many twists and turns since then.

Tim Keown, our reporter on this piece, traveled to Australia to watch Ball play and get to know him. We paused production during the early days of quarantine but Tim, his producer Jeremy Williams, editor Rachel Ullrich and talent producer Stacey Pressman stayed in close touch with Ball and his team. Once the new NBA Draft Lottery date was set, as the pandemic stabilized in California (before it turned again), we picked up reporting again.

There was an opportunity for Tim to drive from his own home in California to do a socially-distanced interview with Ball at his home and learn how he was managing during quarantine and keeping up his game. [Director of Photography] Karen Frank and her team spent a lot of time figuring out how to reimagine processes for a socially distant cover shoot with a local photographer to capture still photos for our cover image.

It’s a lot of credit to the relationships built by the team over these many months that even during the pandemic, Ball and his team stayed open to sharing his story, his time, and working with us to reimagine what an “access” piece looks like.
ESPN SVP, Multiplatform Storytelling and Journalism, Alison Overholt, on ESPN working with LaMelo Ball’s camp

A few weeks later, Ball invited Tim and producer Jeremy Williams to meet with him again in Detroit for the on-camera sit down portion and, after much discussion and evaluation of local COVID-19 status, they headed to Michigan.

Jeremy brought a camera, produced, and shot everything with Tim, so this was our leanest Cover Story production yet. And as the Draft Lottery date moved around the calendar, [Director of Audience Engagement] Erin Spraw on the audience engagement team, [social media manager] Kellin Bliss on the social team and [Senior Vice President, Production & Content Strategy] Jill Frederickson on the SportsCenter side helped navigate when to land this one on our schedules.

It’s a lot of credit to the relationships built by the team over these many months that even during the pandemic, Ball and his team stayed open to sharing his story, his time, and working with us to reimagine what an “access” piece looks like.

Forget producing feature projects and docs during a pandemic — I know of some production colleagues who were editing pieces in their cars a couple of weeks ago in order to get hotspot access during the power and internet outages after Hurricane Isaias ripped through Connecticut. – Overholt

What are the challenges of putting together a collaborative multi-dimensional story when your team is spread out? How did your team adapt to overcome them?
By this point, we’re all six months in, and ‘the way we used to do things’ is a distant memory for all of us here at ESPN. Forget producing feature projects and docs during a pandemic — I know of some production colleagues who were editing pieces in their cars a couple of weeks ago in order to get hotspot access during the power and internet outages after Hurricane Isaias ripped through Connecticut!

Alison Overholt. (Rich Arden/ESPN Images)

The remarkable thing is how, no matter what stormy seas our various groups have faced this year, everyone has surfed those waves and ultimately landed tricks we didn’t even know they had.

At this stage, collaboration is table stakes: We have an ESPN Cover Story leadership team that spans the social, digital audience development, long-form feature production, content creative and digital storytelling teams, with folks in Bristol, New York, North Carolina and Los Angeles, so they are used to working collaboratively from wherever they are.

And the pandemic has just raised everyone’s Zoom game to a new level. Toggling between Zoom and Slack to keep the real-time collaboration juices flowing has been the team’s foundation.

But the true reinvention, as I mentioned, was in how to stay connected with our subjects through this time, and then completely reinventing how we think about photoshoots, access-driven reporting, on-camera interviews, and post-production in this current environment.

It has meant leaning into having remote folks FaceTime into shoots and offer remote production direction, to keep in-person presence small and physical distancing as a priority.

It has meant retraining folks to edit from home instead of using post-houses, using collaboration technology to share screens during edits instead of sitting side-by-side. And it’s meant having a tremendous amount of patience, flexibility, and ingenuity—serious props to [executive editor] Scott Burton, [senior coordinating producer] Andy Tennant, Neely Lohmann, and [senior creative director] Chin Wang, all of them leaders who have embraced guiding their teams through these new situations from a problem-solving mindset.

What’s the next Cover Story we can look anticipate?
When we launched ESPN Cover Story, we planned for it to be a monthly franchise. But after taking a pandemic hiatus along with the live sports world for several months, you’re seeing us come back with several in a row as sports return in a rush! We had [Senior MLB Insider] Jeff Passan’s Fernando Tatis, Jr. ESPN Cover Story a couple of weeks ago, then Keown on LaMelo Ball out this week. You can look for two great NFL installments coming in the next month—a second from Keown and our first ESPN Cover Story by The Undefeated’s Domonique Foxworth.