MOBILE, Ala. — A local television station has named Josh Jackson as its new sports director, bringing in a journalist whose career has included stops in four states and a stretch teaching broadcast journalism at the university level.
The Background
Jackson is a Mississippi native who has traveled across the country covering sports and news stories.
Before moving to Mobile, he worked in Kansas City as a broadcast journalism professor and journalist. He has worked in Ohio, Mississippi, Kansas and Missouri, covering everything from politics to sports.
He earned an Emmy Award for his coverage while serving as a sports director at a Mississippi station.
The Job
Jackson will lead the station’s multiplatform sports coverage on television, online and on the station’s streaming app.
The word “multiplatform” carries real weight in a local newsroom now. A sports director’s responsibilities no longer end with the evening sportscast. Highlights are cut for social platforms, stories are written for the web, live coverage streams through an app, and audience patterns differ substantially across those channels.
A local sports audience that once watched at 10 p.m. now checks scores on a phone at 9:30. The broadcast remains the anchor, but the reach comes from everything around it.
The Academic Detour
Jackson’s time as a broadcast journalism professor in Kansas City is the least conventional item on his résumé, and among the more relevant.
He graduated from Belhaven University, where he was named the school’s Young Alumnus of the Year in 2018, and earned a master’s degree from Jackson State University — where he later began teaching. He also served as an adjunct professor at Wiley University in Texas.
Journalists who teach tend to return to newsrooms with a different set of skills. Explaining craft to students requires articulating decisions that practitioners usually make by instinct — why a story leads where it does, what a shot needs to accomplish, how to structure a package. That habit translates directly into supervising younger reporters, which is a substantial part of what a department head does.
Why Local Sports Directors Matter
The sports director position occupies a distinctive place in a local television station.
National sports coverage is abundant and free. What a local station provides that nothing else does is coverage of the high school football team, the regional college program, the youth athletes and the community stories that no network has any reason to tell.
In the Mobile market, that means Friday night high school football across Mobile and Baldwin counties, the University of South Alabama, area athletes who move on to college and professional programs, and the recreational and youth sports that involve a substantial share of local families.
High school football coverage in particular is among the most-watched local content in Alabama markets during the fall. A Friday night highlights show is appointment viewing in a way that little else on local television remains.
The Mobile Market
Mobile anchors a television market covering coastal Alabama and portions of the Florida Panhandle and Mississippi — a mid-sized market with a sports landscape deeper than its size suggests.
The area produces Division I and professional athletes at a rate disproportionate to its population, hosts the Senior Bowl, supports a Division I university athletic program, and follows Alabama and Auburn with the intensity characteristic of the state.
For an incoming sports director, that is a market with enough material to fill a schedule and an audience that cares about the results.
Moving Down the Ladder Is Not the Story
Jackson’s path — Ohio, Mississippi, Kansas, Missouri, a professorship, and now Mobile — reflects how broadcast journalism careers are actually built.
Reporters move between markets to advance, and a sports director role in a market the size of Mobile is a department head position with meaningful editorial authority. The Emmy earned in a previous sports director role indicates work that was recognized beyond the station that aired it.
What Comes Next
Jackson takes over leadership of the station’s sports coverage across television, digital and streaming platforms.
The practical test for any new sports director in this market arrives on Friday nights in the fall, when the volume of games across two counties has to be covered, cut and aired in a compressed window — and when local viewers notice immediately whether their team made the show.