We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Iggy Monda. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Iggy below.

Iggy, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

In today’s media industry, I think one of the most valuable assets you can develop is versatility. I’m a journalist with experience in print, audio, and video. I made it a priority to learn how to tell stories through each medium because – once you develop your storytelling – certain narratives are best told with intimate tape in audio, with extensive reporting in writing, or through a more energetic lens with video.

Sometimes you work at places that don’t exactly fit the job profile you want, but you can still use it to your advantage. For example, I was one of Overtime’s first ever videographers as an intern. It’s not a journalism company. They weren’t producing the content I particularly wanted to be making, but I learned more from the video producers there on how to shoot with different cameras, how to edit in post, how to prepare for the field than I ever did in a classroom. By the time I went to Yahoo! Finance for my first post-college journalism job, I was teaching the rest of the VOD team how to shoot on Sony cameras and how to maneuver around Adobe Premiere Pro.

It’s also super important to find – often times just from being lucky – the supervisors who share the same kind of storytelling approach and ideas that you have because they’ll give you a license to develop your interests. People like Robin Kawakami at Today! and Kate McAuliffe helped me build my storytelling voice and learn how to tie narrative threads together for whichever story I’m working on.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a born-and-bred New Yorker. When I was growing up, my only dream – like so many other New Yorkers – wast to become the second coming of Derek Jeter. And I really thought I could. We both played shortstop, we both loved the Yankees, we hit for average over power.

Unfortunately while Jeter is 6’3”, I am…not.

Even though I discovered I might not have a future in playing sports professionally, I still knew I wanted to be around that world. And I soon learned I just love telling stories.

While my reporting has ranged from entertainment to politics to science, my favorite beat I return to will always be sports. But I’m not your average sports journalist. I’m not very interested in telling you about some game’s box score. Instead, I focus on human-interest sports stories. Basically, I tell stories anyone can relate to but just happen to be in the world of sports. I’ve worked on narratives about Japan’s budding basketball culture, the search for Evander Holyfield’s missing ear (cartilage), and – most recently – a series that explores hazing culture in high school sports programs. It’s called Roughhousing, and it took about two years to make because it required intensive reporting with very personal narratives, research, sound design, and a lot of care.

I started the whole Roughhousing journey wanting to shed a light on a phenomenon that we allow to happen in our schools, to our kids. I just wanted to understand why. And through that journey a lot of people have shared their most painful moments, their lowest points, their scariest thoughts. So, I didn’t want to rush the process.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

2023 was one of the toughest – if not the toughest – year for media professionals. There are a legion of awesomely talented journalists out there that are struggling to find a place to share their stories and make a living because of a lack of investment into their reporting. I’m sure everyone has seen the multiple large layoffs from Spotify to Sports Illustrated to NPR and the NY Times.

There really isn’t any great solution here other than start a company with lots of funding or paying for more news. But we are losing a lot of great stories that exist in the world, and they are being replaced by redundant, easily-produced “sellable” content. We’re losing a lot of intensive reporting and getting people with a microphone sharing opinions and manifestos with little objective backing.

If we care about hearing stories from all kinds of experiences and pockets in this world, we need to show support for all kinds of storytellers. And we need to read more and listen more and watch more stuff, preferably outside of a 60-second clip on social media.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

For a lot of journalists, their favorite part of working on any story will always be seeing how people react to it. It’s definitely rewarding to see if what you worked on lands with people who can empathize with the characters or the plot.

My favorite part will always be meeting the people that will take part in the story, getting to learn what makes their living experience different from the norm, and how it can demonstrate different qualities of society.

But when we talk about rewarding, there’s probably nothing more rewarding than hearing how your interview tape sounds like together while you’re editing it. Seeing how the pieces fit together into a larger picture will always put a smile on your face.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.iggymonda.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iggysmallz1/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ignazio-monda-485613113/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/IggyMondaNYC

Image Credits
Eli Edwards – PreShow-15 Overtime – IMG_7821