Rob King, who oversees ESPN’s SportsCenter and News, will speak Thursday,
Rob King
April 2, at 5:30 p.m. in the Nott Memorial.
His talk, “The Content of Our Character: How Storytellers ‘Color’ Stories,” is part of the Presidential Forum on Diversity series. The lecture is free and open to the public.
King, who joined ESPN in 2004, was named senior vice president of SportsCenter and ESPN’s newsgathering operations in January 2014.
He has also served as senior vice president, Content, ESPN Digital and Print Media. As such, he was responsible for all content and the overall editorial direction of ESPN’s leading portfolio of digital and print sports properties, including text, audio, video and multimedia content. He also oversaw management of the award-winning team of more than 200 editors, writers and designers across ESPN.com and its network of related sites, ESPN The Magazine and espnW.
He served as vice president and editor-in-chief of ESPN.com before adding oversight of digital video and audio content as well as all editorial content on ESPN’s local sites. In 2004 he was senior coordinating producer in the studio production unit.
Fast Company named King among its “Most Creative People 2014.”
From 1997-2004, he was at the Philadelphia Inquirer, serving as graphic artist, deputy sports editor, assistant managing editor and deputy managing editor. Before that, King worked at the Louisville Courier-Journal as a graphic artist, director of photography and presentation editor. From 1987 through 1992, he worked at the Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, N.J., a major suburban Philadelphia paper.
King received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Wesleyan University. He also studied journalism at Penn State as part of the School of Communication’s inaugural graduate class. A past Pulitzer Prize judge, King is a member of the Associated Press board of directors, the National Sports Journalism Center’s advisory board and the Poynter Institute’s National Advisory Board, where he serves as chair.
Preceding King’s talk at 5 p.m. is a president's reception, also open to the public.
The Presidential Forum on Diversity was established in 2006 by President Stephen C. Ainlay to bring in notable speakers on a wide range of topics that promote diversity and inclusiveness.
Previous speakers have included poet Maya Angelou, journalist and television news anchor John Quiñones, Eugene Robinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post, faith leader Eboo Patel, Broadway star Anthony Rapp and actress Marlee Matlin.