I Am Pretty Offended I Didn't Get A Thank You In Katie Nolan's Emmy Award Speech
Last night, Fox Sports 1’s Katie Nolan won a Sports Emmy for “Outstanding Social TV Experience” for her show Garbage Time after a couple of seasons, a pretty crazy accomplishment for a woman who’s really been on the national scene for just a few years. But what you may not know is that what got her start at Fox Sports was the intrepid foresight of one brave man who recognized Katie’s potential at a young age, a true iconoclast who saw a Boston bartender and thought “This girl has all the checkmarks that could make her successful as a video/TV personality.” That person is not referenced in the above Emmy acceptance speech. That person is me.
In 2009, I was working in public relations at a company called Bankrate.com that did mostly personal finance content. I was tired of my job even though the people were great and the work was easy so I decided it was time to look for a way out. The two main things I did was dabbling in stand-up comedy and working on the idea of launching a men’s interest website with the hopes of one of them leading to a new career. Stand-up was so insanely time consuming that I would have had to quit my job to go full bore at it but the website thing started working out quickly while I kept my day job. It was a website called Guyism.com which did a traditional Gawker-type coverage of viral stuff, sports stories, and celebrity things. Though young, the site quickly did well both with traffic and financials but was missing one thing I saw in other sites: A big personality to build a community.
For me, as a 25-year-old running a company with no experience doing so, I saw a site like Barstool at the time and knew being someone like Pres who puts all this content about himself out was not for me. I wanted to be taken seriously as someone running a startup and as a blogger (lol in hindsight, younger versions of me were such precious idiots at times) so I figured it might be easier to have someone else play that part and in return they’d get a chance to be seen by our audience and really build up a following. Plus, as a guy site, I thought it might be good to get a girl in for both clicks and to protect us from some of the angry women’s sites that were then popping up at the time that seemed like they could cause us trouble down the line.
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I figured we could hire some braindead cute girl to do the idea I had in mind, a daily video series breaking down and making jokes about the top news stories each day, but the problem is it would have required more work for me writing and scripting that and I was doing 10 blogs a day and trying to keep the business afloat (like for real, times were lean and we had staffers married and with kids so you can imagine the pressure on someone who’d rather just be drinking and fucking around). At the time we were trying out some new writers, one of whom was a girl I found on Tumblr and initially thought was a guy because she wrote in a funny way, very caustic, pretty unrefined but with something there relatable for guys that most female voices didn’t have online. So I thought why not have her do the job instead? She didn’t want to do video and was deathly afraid of it but she could do the writing part and get coached up on camera. It just made sense. Based on the headline, you’ve probably figured out now that that girl is Katie Nolan.
In the beginning, it was a rough haul. Katie REALLY didn’t want to do video, had no interest in it, thought she’d get farther as a writer, wasn’t confident that she could be good on camera. And on top of that she was a bartender at a Boston bar who hadn’t ever really worked an actual structured job and wasn’t being paid much by us early so it was tough to keep her focused and getting videos out in a timely fashion. As she’s readily admitted publicly, the early videos weren’t great. Doing video is all about repetition but, for her, it was also about learning a process to write it and perform and produce daily and really figure out how to do all of at the time. It was what we were all doing to keep Guyism running, figuring it out as we went. The videos, called the Guyism Speed Round, started to build up a regular if not huge following, never making any money but giving us a different bit of content. After enough practice and development, Katie started to get good and the videos were qualitatively funny 9 times out of 10 and because the site was pretty big, people really noticed online with companies like ESPN, Fox, and Barstool (*insert shocked emoji*) trying to hire Katie away from us at various points.
But she and we rode it out and got to the point where I sold Guyism to another company who did ads for us in early 2013. We were almost acquired a few months earlier by a company I adored, Thrillist, but they backed out in the last possible moments right before the deal was supposed to go through thanks to some collusion between paparazzi photo lawsuits and I was so desperate to do a deal that’d give us all more resources that I went with this company I was less bullish on instead. Right away, I recognized I fucked up. They gave me nothing I was promised in terms of responsibilities, fucked up our tech situation, screwed me on a contract, gave favored nations status to the other site they bought first (BroBible), it sucked. But Katie was going to move up to NYC, have her own studio, finally get a chance to work with real video producers, maybe start to lay the groundwork for the next step in her career.
But a few months after the acquisition, a guy I’d worked with as an ad partner for years whose company had been acquired by Fox Sports reached out, the Pete Vlastellica guy Katie mentions in her speech. They were launching Fox Sports 1 and looking for new personalities and he was tasked with heading it up. He’d seen a lot of Katie since Fox/his old company paid Guyism a lot of money each month for rights to our ad inventory and thought she’d do a good job. Right away, I knew it was the move for her. The company who bought us had already shown me they weren’t going to do what we needed from them and the window of opportunity for a woman working in media really has only so long to strike and make the most of it and I knew this spot on a brand new network would be perfect for her. So I took the hit and pushed her to leave whether she wanted to or not and ended up negotiating a six-figure ad buy from Fox Sports 1 for our new parent company (which they were nice enough to tell me I “wasn’t commission eligible” for on the ad buy since I was an editorial director, you can imagine how thrilled I am that my financial future is still tied up in them but that’s neither here nor there) in exchange for them being able to audition and potentially take her unimpeded even though I knew it’d make my job harder. But it was the right marriage for her and Fox Sports 1 and my new parent company (really everyone but me so that’s chill in hindsight) so it had to happen. And it did.
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Katie left. She ended up on a derivative show hosted by Regis that got canceled and had her flirtation with ESPN/Bill Simmons and I think genuinely wasn’t sure how her career would end up but I never really worried for her. Katie’s always had this Thing about her, a likeable quality but one where she works best alone with room to create and figure things out, and I knew someone would figure that out like I did early on. And they did with her show Garbage Time, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the show I created with her five years ago. But it’s great especially since she did all this her own way, doing things herself the same way she learned to do in her trial by fire while I worked with her, and I genuinely couldn’t be prouder of her for coming this far in such a short period of time. The show is her, not a machine of writers creating an image, and I think that authenticity is what helped get her to a place where she could win an award like this.
So that was a long-winded background but that brings us back to the real point of this blog in the headline: Other than this blog, I don’t look for credit. I don’t tweet incessantly seeking attention, I don’t create podcasts about things people don’t care about just to hear myself talk, I don’t ask for much besides being free to write blogs about whatever interests me that’ll hopefully get clicked a lot. But it would have REALLY been cool to have been thanked during an Emmy speech with one of a handful of people whose career I’ve actually had a direct impact on and that didn’t happen. Now I take solace in the fact that she didn’t even thank her awesome and supportive parents, not bad Emmy speech snubbing company to keep, and even more solace in the fact that Pres somehow didn’t get a shoutout in there. But it stings man. Katie’s success is really the last vestige of the site I created from scratch — which only lives on as a part of BroBible since, after Katie and I left the site, it didn’t have much editorial reason to keep existing on its own — that took up SO much of my youth with not much to show for it besides some paid off student loans and some stock in a company where management allegedly snorted venture capital funding up their noses. So being thanked in an Emmy speech really would have gone a long way in making me feel like I didn’t entirely waste my mid to late 20s.
So congrats Katie Nolan. I am proud, I am happy for you, but now if I don’t get an invite onto your show or podcast or at least a very tasteful gift basket valued above $100 to make up for this snub, you’ve made an enemy for life my friend.
PS Katie getting drunk before an Emmy speech may seem like one of those Jennifer Lawrence “I’m such a regular girl!” fake moments but I can guarantee it’s legit. One time she couldn’t do her videos for us for a week because she got too drunk and vomited all over her laptop, which as you can imagine did not help its functionality. Can you name another Emmy award winner who can claim that from the first stop in their career?
PPS If you still want more on this after all these words, we did Katie’s exit interview on my old podcast. I haven’t re-listened to it since it first ran but I remember it getting pretty real at points, should be interesting. And plus this link isn’t hosted by that company who bought my old site so they don’t get a click. Makes me feel a little better today.