We’ve seen plenty of media members leave to work for professional teams, and it’s perhaps a particularly growing trend in the NHL. A few recent examples include TSN’s Gary Lawless leaving for the Las Vegas Golden Knights and former ESPNer Scott Burnside joining the Dallas Stars. Now, longtime TSN 690 Montreal reporter and anchor Amanda Stein is headed to the New Jersey Devils, as she tweeted Monday:
My Announcement…After 7 years at TSN I have decided to move on… My letter, written the only way I know how: pic.twitter.com/lG4SGXxx6i
— Amanda Stein (@amandacstein) August 7, 2017
Hiring media veterans makes a lot of sense for teams, and perhaps especially for NHL teams. The everlasting waves of sports media cuts have often hit hockey coverage particularly hard, as we saw with ESPN, and it’s very much a buyers’ market when it comes to writers and broadcasters (something we’ve also seen with the expansion of The Athletic and other local sportswriting sites). It’s also not necessarily easy to get fans to think of the team’s own site as a destination for news, analysis or videos about the team, and bringing in respected media members can help with that. There can be challenges with working for a team or league network or site, though, so it’s not always an easy jump.
Stein certainly has plenty of experience in the NHL world, as she regularly covered the Canadiens for TSN 690 and sister station CJAD 800. And as Nick Varney notes at SB Nation Devils’ site All About The Jersey, she had been covering the Devils’ prospects camp earlier this summer (which is where the photo at top comes from). She has significant interviewing experience, and seems like a good fit for an all-access host role, something more and more teams are going towards. We’ll see how Stein does with the Devils.
[Amanda Stein on Twitter]
