Pacific Index

Pacific University’s Digital Media Director, shares about his experience at Pacific. 

Pacific Index: What exactly does a Digital Media Director do?

 Zach Mortland: I oversee athletics, social media pages, and our broadcast live stream. I also oversee Boxer Creative, which is a student club for people who are interested in photography, graphic design, and broadcasting.

Index: How did you get started? 

ZM: While I was doing that, I interned with an amateur baseball team, who was led by Kelly Loft, the sports information director at Southwest Minnesota State. When I decided to get my master’s degree, he asked me to be the grad assistant for him, and that’s how I got into sports information, marketing, that side of things, because I just wanted my school paid for. When I finished my master’s degree, I was looking for jobs, and Pacific was open, and it’s very similar to what I did as a grad student.”

Index: Okay, but how did you end up in Forest Grove? 

ZM: The big thing for me was coming from Minnesota, I wanted to live somewhere that I didn’t have to deal with winters, so being out here, in my mind, we don’t really have winters, so that was really nice. I really was excited about the opportunity to kind of focus solely on digital media and kind of build that up. One of the things I talked with Keith Buckley (Pacific University Athletic Director) was that it’s a fairly new position, so I can kind of make this position what I think it needs to be, and that was really appealing to me to be able to kind of have that freedom and be able to kind of take it where I think it should go.”

Index: How does the job at Pacific compared to what you were doing before?  

ZM: “We have a lot more student engagement , and that’s been a lot of fun for me because it makes my life a lot easier, and I get to help people find their path on doing what they want.

We have 20-plus teams that we need to coordinate media days and events with. We need to make sure that pictures are being taken at events, coordinating live streams. One difference here compared to my old school, for instance, I oversee the broadcast at every event instead of kind of splitting that time with Derek Wiley (Sports Information Director) if that makes sense, so the constant kind of ‘go, go, go’ is always a challenge, but at this point, I’ve been doing it for five years, so it gets a little easier with time and experience.

Index: Any advice for students who want to get into sports information careers? 

ZM: “I mean, I know what it’s like to have graduated college and assume or hope that there’s gonna be a full-time job waiting for you when it’s not always that simple. You have to do gigs here and there and have to take part-time jobs to build up that resume, so that’s kind of been one of my points of emphasis with people right now is that you might not be doing exactly what you want to be doing right now, but you’re building a resume or portfolio to put yourself in a position to get a job later on. I’m not going to sugarcoat it, it’s a lot of long hours and hard jobs and things like that, and everybody finds a different reason right? To me, it is the community. It is getting to connect with athletes, with students, with coaches, with parents of kids, that’s why I do this.”