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Let’s pull back the Olympic curtain 🥇👩‍💻

Rachel G Bowers   Paste BN

Alongside my colleagues Nancy Armour and Sydney Bergan, I did a Reddit AMA a few days ago to answer Olympics questions. We got quite a few questions about how we go about doing our jobs and planning coverage for such a massive event. So here’s a bit more on exactly that.

With multiple Olympic events going on all over the city at exactly the same time, how does your team decide who goes where during the games?

Me: We start off by pinpointing the events we know audiences will care most about: Gymnastics, swimming, track & field, basketball, soccer. Because we are Paste BN and we tend to focus mostly on American Olympians, we then look at the events in which the U.S. has really competitive athletes or athletes who have really intriguing stories and we deploy reporters to those events. It's definitely a huge balance and the TL;DR is that you can make all the plans you want, but the Olympic gods will laugh at you for that and you must stay nimble and respond to the story of the day!

What are the hardest and easiest parts of Olympic coverage?

Me: The most challenging part is making sure our massive team, which includes many departments from across the company, are all on the same page. The easiest part? I get to watch sports all day for like three weeks, that's pretty cool. My favorite part is working with the writers. I genuinely love helping them shape ideas and go after the stories they care most about writing.

Nancy: The hardest part is the grind. You are working 16-hour days for three weeks straight and there is not enough caffeine in the world that can combat that. There was one day in Tokyo that I couldn't figure out why my vision was so blurry. Turns out, I'd put both my contacts in the same eye. The struggle is real. Also wouldn't trade it for anything. But you also feel a responsibility to meet the moment. It is not lost on me that I am covering some of the most amazing sporting achievements I've ever seen, and I owe it to that athlete and to you all reading about it to do that justice. It's incumbent on me to give you the very best recounting of that event and that athlete that I can. It's a privilege to cover an Olympics and I am conscious of that every day. Easiest part? Appreciating that I get to do this.

Sydney: I'm anticipating the hardest part being knowing what our audience priorities are every day. There's going to be a million different things we could use to make content, so we'll really have to narrow in on what's important to our audience (all of you!). Easiest is definitely getting to be in Europe. If you're going to be working hard, it's definitely better to work hard in Paris!

Check out our full AMA, where we got into what sports we think we’d be great at, what sports we’d probably die trying, what sport we think is slept on by Americans, our favorite past host cities, our favorite Pringles flavor (Nancy and Sydney are wrong!) and so much more.

The other quick hits you need to know.

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