Mike Emmett

Mike Emmett was the first fulltime sports editor on the World Wide Web Emmett worked with the other members of Nando.net to produce The Nando Times, an online version of the paper viewed via a BBS using Lynx. In 1994-95, when Nando launched one of the first sports and news sites on the Web, Emmett continued his role as fulltime Sports Editor.
Early life
Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Emmett is the son of Irish-American parents. After graduating from college in 1976, where he was the managing editor of The Parthenon which is the student newspaper of Marshall University based in Huntington, West Virginia, he began his newspaper career at Register-Herald in Beckley, West Virginia. In the 1980s, Emmett became a company publications manager for chains including Wendy's, , Red Lobster and The Olive Garden. In 1984, he opened his own restaurant Ritzy's in Huntington, W.Va.
Total Sports
Frank Daniels III, the editor of the online newspaper and Web site, and his father, Frank Daniels Jr., sold The N&O and Nando.net to McClatchy Newspapers in 1995. In 1996, Frank Daniels III left the company and founded Koz, a software firm that later became Total Sports, an organization that handled the online content for sites such as Golf.com], The Wall Street Journal Online, The LA Times, Toronto Star, Total Baseball, Beer.com, an MLB statistics network that provided pitch-by-picth results online and for The Associate Press, and about 80 official sports Web sites for major universities across the country such asGoDuke.com. Total Sports' landed a contract with the collegiate Atlantic Coast Conference to provide live online coverage of ACC games, a novelty at the time. This later led to a contract with the NCAA to cover the annual basketball tournament FinalFour.net. Emmett was the third person hired at Total Sports as its managing editor, reporting to VP Eric Harris. Together, they built an editorial operation in four years with more than 100 newsroom employees. Also during this time, Emmett co-founded SportsEditor.com in 1997, the first home for online sports journalists in the world which has since been replaced by the Online News Association. In its heyday, SE.com had more than 200 members working for some of the largest media companies in the country. He sold the domain and closed the site down in 2003 due to time constraints. Emmett also worked as a consultant for United Press International and Alabama Live, where he served as that site's first sports editor as well. At UPI, he was responsible for maintaining a stringer network of dozens of writers across the country who provided content for UPI to sell to its clients.
2000 and after
After the Dot-Com Bubble burst in 2000, Emmett followed former Total Sports president George Schlukbier to Miami, Florida, and became the managing editor of Terra.com. Following that, he took over the reins as managing editor of NASCAR.com. After a few years in Atlanta, Georgia, he moved first to Greenville, South Carolina as Assistant Editor of GreenvilleOnline.com, and then onto Media General where he was the Regional Content Manager for that organization's seven newspaper Web sites in Western North Carolina.
Emmett has worked for several major newspapers such as FloridaToday.com (Melbourne, Florida), The Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville, Florida), The Rocky Mountain News (Denver, Colorado), The Columbus Citizen-Journal (Columbus, Ohio) and TheBuffaloNews.com (Buffalo, New York).
Writing career
He is the author of Demon, a horror fiction novel that is scheduled to be published in late 2011. He is currently working on a non-fiction book about how the Web has changed society's values (Dot-Con: How The Web Tangled Up Our World). He is a member of the Horror Writers Association, as well as The Society of Professional Journalists, Authorlink, Knights of Columbus, and Kentucky Colonels Association.

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