Talk:Sam Smith (sportswriter)

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Proposed revision[edit]

I am handling an OTRS ticket initiated by the the subject of this article (Sam Smith) who has complained that the article is out of date and inaccurate. He sent this proposed revision:

Sam Smith (born on January 24, 1948, in Brooklyn, New York) is an NBA writer for the Chicago Bulls website bulls.com.

Smith started at the Chicago Tribune as a political/general assignment writer. He wrote for the Tribune on the city news and national staffs, the business department and Sunday magazine before moving to sports full time in 1983. He was a sports feature writer and NBA basketball writer until becoming full time Bulls/NBA writer in 1987. He is the author or co-author of several books, including The New York Times best seller, The Jordan Rules. He also has been a columnist for the Sporting News, ESPN.com, NBC.com, HoopsHype.com, Inside Sports magazine and NBA publications in China and Japan. He appears frequently on radio and TV, including The Tony Kornheiser Show. He received the lifetime achievement award from the Pro Basketball Writers Association and the Curt Gowdy Media Award from the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

Update: the only real change to content was in the "Personals" section, everything else was pretty much verbatim of the original article. I have made the changes, as well as rearranged the paragraphs as I proposed above. ~Amatulić (talk) 21:28, 7 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Pre-Tribune years[edit]

Smith attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn and Pace University in New York City, graduating with a bachelor's degree in accounting in 1970. He worked two years on the auditing staff of Arthur Young & Co. and then earned a master's degree in journalism from Ball State University. He is in the journalism Hall of Fame at Ball State. He was a staff and investigative reporter for the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel and congressional reporter and managing editor for States News Service in Washington, D.C. He then became press secretary to Connecticut U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker. He left Weicker's staff to join The Tribune in November 1979.

Books and articles[edit]

Smith has written: The Jordan Rules and Second Coming: The Strange Odyssey of Michael Jordan from Courtside to Home Plate and Back Again (or simply Second Coming). He also is co-author of the basketball book, The Perfect Team, and the Total Basketball Encyclopedia.

Personal[edit]

He is married to Kathleen since 1976 and has two children, Connor and Hannah-Li, and lives in Geneva, Illinois.

Smith frequently speaks to student college student groups, including annually at Arizona State University, and appeared as a speaker at the Roosevelt University Basketball Coaches Clinic in 2012 headed up by Kevin Devitt.

Content-wise, the proposal above is largely the same as the existing article, with minor changes and additions. I figure, since the article is unsourced (I added a bio source yesterday that Mr Smith sent to OTRS), and this revision is unsourced, we may as well replace one unsourced version with another, since the version from the primary source is likely more reliable than a version from random editors.

Structurally, I'd change the "Pre-Tribune Years" heading above to "Career" and move the paragraph after the lead sentence into that section.

If there is no objection, I will incorporate the changes to the article over the next week. ~Amatulić (talk) 15:10, 1 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]