QuickTake:

Mirjam Swanson remembers the unglamorous reps that shaped her career, notes that she is still annoyed at being passed over for jobs at the Daily Emerald, and describes her perfect Los Angeles sports day.

LOS ANGELES — Mirjam Swanson arrived for coffee Sunday on Sunset Boulevard with her boarding pass still tucked inside a book.

The Los Angeles Times sports columnist had just flown back from Oklahoma City on Friday, covered the Lakers’ Game 3 loss to the Thunder in LA on Saturday and would head back to the arena Monday to put a bow on the 2026 playoffs for one of the biggest sports stories in the city.

It’s busy. It’s stressful. And it’s a long way from when Swanson, now 48, was passed over for staff positions at the Daily Emerald nearly 30 years ago.

I caught up with Swanson, a former University of Oregon student and Daily Emerald sports editor, to talk about the challenges of covering LeBron James, the lessons she learned from early mistakes covering high school sports and the “healthy” chip on her shoulder she still carries.  

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Lookout Eugene-Springfield: What’s the challenge in writing about really famous people and trying to tell stories in the way that you like to tell them, while knowing that this is LeBron James, this is the Los Angeles Lakers and there are millions of people reading about these guys?

Mirjam Swanson: If only millions of people read what I wrote. Kidding.

I don’t know that it’s that much different writing about LeBron James and the Lakers. Their story has been told and told, so telling fans something they don’t know is the goal. You have to know the story very well, so that when you hear something new, you recognize it and you know to share it. The fans can’t be in the locker room with you, so you just try and let them in with you. 

But otherwise, I think it actually feels like less of a responsibility than writing about people who are less famous, because those people won’t have a million articles written about them — and they will definitely read what you write.

What did your career writing about way less famous people teach you?

It was just doing everything and anything. The beautiful thing about this job is getting to learn about people in whatever situation they’re in, sports or otherwise, and just living and experiencing and thinking and recording and observing. It’s reps and reps and reps.

I think what I bring to column writing now is just lived experience covering sports for, I don’t know, however many years it’s been since I was a child. So that informs my perspective on it all.

I try to be fair and as nuanced as I can get away with while still having a warm enough take that makes people want to read. And you develop your voice as a writer. The more you write, the more you learn how to write.

What’s your go-to “back in my day” story? For instance, I always found that the higher level of sports you cover, the easier the actual job gets. We didn’t get stats handed to us covering high school games, you know?

When I started covering college sports at Oregon, you had your stats and they made players available and you had a roster you could refer to in the media guide.

And when I first got into high school sports, they were like, “Hey, go cover this Arcadia-St. Francis football game.” They were like, “Do you got this?” And I was like, “Yeah, I’ve covered Oregon football. This will be fine. This is high school football. Please.”

And then I got there and I’m like, wait, stats? Oh, shit. I had never done it before. Within a quarter, I was completely blown out of the water. There were some very kind sports writers who were also covering the game, as well as the St. Francis stats people.

I still didn’t quite get it right, because back in the day we had to do the whole box score. That was like, OK, I have to get my arithmetic skills on point if I’m going to cover this.

A week later I went out and covered a water polo match. The scorekeeper had all the names on her score sheet, so I copied them into my notebook. One of them was written in a way that made me think the player’s name was something completely different.

She was the backup goalkeeper who came who saved the day. It was a big story. Big headline. Wrong name.

I was pretty beat up about that one. So I quickly learned to double-check the roster. I felt so bad that I found her afterward and apologized. She was a very sweet kid.

So, yeah, you live and you learn. You make a lot of mistakes. But from those, I learned how to keep stats and double-check names.

Are mistakes easier for you to handle later in your career?

No. They should be. That’s one thing for me: Do you lose sleep?

Yes.

Because I lose sleep. I’ll wake up at 2 in the morning like, “Wait, did I just get the score wrong?” And I have to get up and check.

It is hard — impossible, really — to be right all the time about everything, especially when you’re on deadline and rushing and often tired. But you expect yourself to be, and you want to be.

What do you remember about your time at UO?

So much. I remember taking “Info Hell.” It was Information Gathering 101. You had to do a 100-page research paper, and I did mine on public housing reform in Chicago.

I was really into the topic and just threw myself into it. People were complaining about it, but I just thought it was so interesting. It was this excuse to call experts and talk to them about it. If you’re just a regular person, you can’t really call up politicians in Illinois and be like, “Hey, I need to ask you some questions about this thing.”

But if you’re writing something, you can. That just blew my mind. I loved taking on a big project.

Obviously, it took me a long time to get on staff at the Emerald and I’m still — how do you put it? — bitter about it in a healthy way. It drove me really hard. I got passed up for staff positions many times, and I used to go for runs listening to Tupac, like, “Picture me rollin’ someday.”

But that made me so much better. Sometimes I like to go back to that place and that version of me so I can push myself.

And getting to cover Oregon sports was such a blessing. It’s big-time enough that it’s really exciting. People really care. But also, it’s fun. And you get the experience of going from being a fan of these teams to covering them, and how that changes things. Both are fun. I love it.

Was being the LA Times columnist always a goal of yours?

I wanted to be Gary Smith. I wanted to write four articles a year for Sports Illustrated and get paid a million dollars. But that’s not going to happen.

Short of that, mostly I just wanted to do the work. Every step of my long and winding career so far, it’s been not exactly what I envisioned, but also exactly what I envisioned.

I did a story on a local music teacher in La Cañada who grew up homeless in Australia on the run from authorities. Her mom was a famous stripper. Just a crazy, crazy life. Incredible woman. Incredible talent. And this light and beacon who had changed so many lives in this town, but a story that nobody knew.

And it was just so far from what I thought I would be writing about. But it was like, do you want to learn about people? Everybody has incredible stories — some are more incredible — but you just kind of go.

I had this vision of what I wanted to do, but that’s really just doing this. Or covering high school water polo in Glendale. Maybe you see a coach yank her best player out of the pool because she saw her do something dirty. And as a parent now, I think about that sometimes — about discipline and why and when and how.

It’s this job that allows us to sort of study the human condition and touch things and ask questions that would be impolite, but are our responsibility. It’s the best.

Last thing: What’s the perfect thing to cover in LA? Is it a World Series at Dodger Stadium?

No, those days are too long. Kidding.

OK, honestly, the perfect day for me would be a USC-UCLA women’s basketball game. A sellout at Pauley. The media seating is far away and the Wi-Fi sucks, so it’s not perfect.

But it takes me back to when I was at Oregon and I really, really fell in love with sports writing covering women’s basketball there. So whenever I cover the JuJus or the UCLA women, it’s like, yeah, little Mirjam would have been stoked.

Tyson Alger covered the Ducks for The Oregonian and The Athletic before branching out on his own to create and run The I-5 Corridor. He brings more than a decade of experience on the University of Oregon sports beat. He has covered everything from Marcus Mariota’s Heisman Trophy-winning season to the Ducks’ first year in the Big 10.