Lessons learned

Marc Spears said he had to "reconstruct his whole brain," to regards to covering the NBA when he moved from The Boston Globe to Yahoo Sports.

Thankfully for him, he's gotten used to keeping an open mind.

"I like doing what no one else is doing," said Spears, who explained the differences in the thought process between the 'big picture' concept of a national web organization and that of a newspaper beat writer.

"I've had to check myself a couple times, because it's hard not to have a beat writer's mentality when you've been doing that for so long."

That mentality is more stressful and more challenging, he said, because unlike a writer that reports on daily happenings, Spears is now expected to break stories from afar without the same tightly knit group of sources. He is counted on to come up with the interesting story, the one no one else is writing.

But Spears welcomes the challenge.

"It's more fun," he said, noting that he prepares himself intensely by reading everything he can get his hands on. "A lot of reporters are lazy and just write what everybody sees. But one of the biggest compliments I got from a reader when I was in Boston, was he said, 'I miss reading you [at the Globe] because I always learned something."

And Spears said he makes it his goal to do the same every day.