Parker Gillam

Covering Missouri football and basketball for Rock M Nation, although I ran blog sites and social media accounts prior to that.

No

To be a journalist is to be passionate about the topics you are covering but even more passionate about telling unique stories.

Chorus, Blox, WordPress.

Since I was young, I have always had a steady passion for college athletics and the many traditions, memories and topics of conversation that stem from them. College football and basketball were always on my family’s TV in the fall/winter and I grew up in the melting pot of the SEC that is otherwise known as Atlanta. Thus, I found myself enamored by those sports early on.Having played basketball and football but not being a top-tier athlete by any means, I knew that I had to find some way to make collegiate athletics part of my life. As a result, I turned to covering and analyzing the sports that I love, and it became an enjoyable pastime for me in high school as I ran an Instagram account called @cfbu_ that garnered over 21k followers alongside a related blog (cfb-university.com). I gained so much from producing content and interacting with my follower base, and I like to imagine that those endeavors served as a springboard for my future.In college, I got my foot in the door through The Maneater, a student-run publication at Mizzou that I covered track and field and recruiting beats for during the Spring of 2021. After that, I took on a job as a beat writer covering Missouri football and basketball for Rock M Nation, a SB Nation affiliate site. I spent three incredible years covering Mizzou athletics, attending games and press conferences, traveling to some road contests and most importantly, telling the many stories that surrounded the memorable teams that I witnessed.Through a friend at Rock M, I was also able to begin writing for The Transfer Portal CFB, an outlet with a website and social media accounts that focused on covering all things college football. I participated in the production of an online 2023 college football preview magazine, contributing a pair of longform feature stories and three team previews that included interviews with coaches, players and athletic directors. During the 2023 season I wrote a weekly “Group of Five Watch” that highlighted the best games of the weekend in the GO5 and monitored the progression of the unofficial entity. Over the offseasons, I contributed a variety of columns as well.Through my coursework at Mizzou, I was also able to work within the Columbia-Missourian, a newspaper outlet that works alongside the Journalism School at MU. As a junior in 2022-23, I covered the Battle High School football team during the fall and the Missouri women’s basketball team in the winter/spring. I attended games and press conferences, as well as produced a feature story on how Battle’s star quarterback gives back to his community and a pair of features on women’s basketball players. As a senior, I worked within the newsroom as a sports desk TA, coming in for nightside shifts to edit and put together the next day’s paper (online and print). I also worked regular news shifts at the Missourian as a part of a Cross-Platform and Editing course.All in all, my main goals have always been to share my passion for college athletics, encourage discourse on the varying topics that surround them and document the many incredible stories that can be found across the sports landscape. The nostalgia I have for CFB and CBB is deep-rooted, and the enjoyment I get out of watching and covering those sports will never fade. Thus, I strive to pursue careers that will keep me around college athletics in one way or another and allow me to play some role in impacting how sports are viewed by the masses.

Yes, I was the sports editor as a junior and then the editor-in-chief as as a senior.

ESPN, Bleacher Report. Specifically, the annual "Bubble Watch" that John Gasaway runs for ESPN.