Today we’d like to introduce you to Christian Pedersen.
Hi Christian, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
San Diego Prep Insider was started in 2015 by Tommy Morris with the intention of creating something new and different in the San Diego high school sports media landscape. While originally a TV show on Fox Sports SD, from its earliest inception, the focus was on making sure the voice of the student-athlete was heard in a new way than before, both in terms of the content and formatting of the show. I (Christian Pedersen, the person writing all this and now in charge) was brought on as one of the first round of hires for the new show in the fall of 2015 and was immediately tasked with focusing on creating digital exclusive content to go along with our TV show. Very quickly into the first season of the show, we realized that the landscape of media consumption was very quickly changing around us and that the number of kids and families interested in sitting down to watch a high school sports show on a cable TV network that not everyone paid for put us behind the time and limited our audience. So, starting in our second season, we began to really focus on putting our content out in a more YouTube / social media-directed focus, and the results were pretty much instant that kids gravitated towards us. Over the next few seasons, we gained a massive social media audience by cutting out the traditional formatting issues that older mediums presented (why tell a kid to wait for their highlights on the 10 PM news when you can tag them on Instagram pretty much in real-time as the game is happening). As we grew and evolved over the years, we found that the specifics of the medium and product have become more of a living breathing creature than a set-in-stone ‘here’s what SD Prep Insider’ is, with the exception that no matter what we continued to put the kids first and focus on delivering what they were telling us that they wanted. Our podcast became less and less providing traditional sports analysis and news and more about having teams from all sports and schools around San Diego joins us on the show to just have real-life conversations about high school, sports, life, and the complexities of being a teenager. Additionally, we learned that while traditional local media that covered local high school sports tended to focus on football/basketball/baseball and mostly the bigger schools and that meant a wide-open lane for us to really crush it with all the other sports (water polo, lacrosse, volleyball, etc…). This combination of focusing on broad spectrum of sports and athletes led us in 2020 to have the chance to become partnered with CIF as the official podcast of the CIF San Diego section, which we still are today.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The biggest struggles that we have had along the way have mostly been in bridging the gap between generations. Kids are the focus of the show, but skewing too young has left us at time struggling to convince people from older generations that we are a legit thing. Mostly this has been advertising people that we have had to try and explaining the older world of impressions/clicks and views to when they are set on only seeing the world through newspaper subscriber numbers or a Neilsen TV rating, and that made the first few years extremely lean and hard to bring on the financing really needed to actually grow this into a product and not just a random blog.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I work in the photo/video/design and editing. Being a small organization in the sports world means I have had to dabble in a lot of parts of the creative content world. When attending a game, I will need to take photos and videos, get interviews, send out updates on social media, etc… but it also means that when the game is over that I need to do things usually a little more creatively than just put them on a PremierPro timeline and send them off to youtube. Gaining an audience and getting people’s attention on social media means that there, I always need to be down to try out new things that Adobe has to offer. I don’t feel as is I specialize in anything other than just being flexible and open to new ideas and styles and not being stuck in a certain way of thinking about how best to deliver content.
How can people work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
Come check out our podcast or follow us on Social https://www.youtube.com/@PrepInsider
Contact Info:
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sdprepinsider/?hl=en
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/SDPrepInsider
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@PrepInsider
