About

Late in the fall of 1996, Leslie Gibson McCarthy took a hiatus from her job as an associate editor at The Sporting News to have her second child — a boy who would grow up to be a defensive lineman on a college football team. But more about him later.

By the time she returned to TSN the following spring, the national sports weekly had entered into an agreement with something called America Online to provide sports content, and she was issued an “email” address.

“What am I supposed to do with an email address when no one else I know has one?” she asked. “And isn’t content exactly what this magazine has been doing for the last 110 years?”

Twenty-five years later, she has more email addresses than she can keep track of and still gets the concept of good content: a good story well told, no matter if it’s through ink on a page, HTML in a website, a post in social media or images through a lens.

Storytelling. That’s the thread woven through McCarthy’s 30-plus-years in journalism, communications and higher education, a career that has taken her everywhere from the press room of the White House to the locker room of the St. Louis Cardinals; from a cornfield movie set in Iowa to the mountains of the Canadian Rockies.

McCarthy earned a bachelor’s degree in English in 1985 at Quincy University in Quincy, Ill., then a master’s in journalism in 1989 from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Upon graduation from Medill, she was hired by the St. Louis-based Sporting News — the third woman in the editorial department — and embarked on a 17-year sports journalism career.

Among her most memorable assignments for Sporting News were a retrospective on baseball’s old stadiums; interviewing Saint Louis University basketball coach Charlie Spoonhour 81/2 months pregnant with her oldest son; covering Major League Baseball’s All-Star games and NCAA Final Fours; and a visit to Iowa and the Field of Dreams movie set. She’s been a member of the Baseball Writers Association of America since 1990 — and still enjoys emeritus status.

She also has freelanced for St. Louis Magazine, the St. Louis Sports Commission, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, among other outlets, and for 17 years, from 2003-2020, wrote a weekly lifestyle column for the South County Times until advertising dollars dried up at the outbreak of COVID-19. When its sister publication, the Webster-Kirkwood Times, returned to publication in the fall of 2020, she became a contributing columnist.

From time to time the Cardinals’ Gameday Magazine will call with assignments such as a behind-the-scenes look at its Ballpark Village, a chat with then-manager Mike Matheny, or a chance to hang out with actor Jon Hamm. Yes, that Jon Hamm.

McCarthy currently works full time as executive news editor in the Office of Public Affairs at Washington University in St. Louis, helping to tell the inspirational stories that come out daily through producing content for The Source.

Content. There’s that word again. Content is storytelling, and storytelling is everything. But of all the stories uncovered over the years, her favorites come from home.

She has been married for more than 29 years to St. Louis University High School history teacher Tom McCarthy, who continually makes her laugh and gave her most of her material for the column.

Her oldest, Matt McCarthy, graduated from Marquette University in 2016, got his law degree from the University of Michigan in 2019, and now is an associate at a Chicago law firm. He not only inspires her every single day; “Go Blue” is now an important part of her vocabulary. And that college football player she had in the pre-email era? Jack McCarthy earned an economics degree from DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., where he spent four seasons playing defensive end for the Div. III Tigers before embarking on a real estate career in St. Louis.

What’s next? Her best content.