About
Aaron Fischman is an award-winning sports writer, editor and multimedia journalist, whose first book, a nonfiction baseball story centered around Tony Barnette’s transformational six years in Tokyo, was published June 18, 2024, and is distributed by Simon & Schuster. By early November, it was named a finalist for the prestigious CASEY Award for best baseball of 2024. He currently hosts the On the NBA Beat podcast, an interview show he co-founded with fellow USC alums Loren Lee Chen and brother Joshua Fischman in advance of the 2015-16 NBA season. On the podcast, he and the crew interview some of the league’s best reporters on their particular beat.
In May 2013, he earned a master’s degree in print and online journalism from USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. While in school, Fischman served as a senior sports editor for Neon Tommy, where his July 2012 NBA Summer League story won third place in the Los Angeles Press Club’s 2013 Online Sports News/Feature/Commentary category and he spearheaded coverage of the 2012 London Summer Olympics. He also edited the story that took second place in the category. In June 2014, Fischman’s intensely personal story on BMX racer Donny Robinson’s history of concussions was awarded third place for LAPC’s 2014 Best Online Sports Feature.
He has written for various online publications, including AccuScore, SLAM Online, FanSided, Fanball and Davis Sports Deli. For three years, Fischman appeared on KDVS 90.3 FM as a play-by-play and color commentator, as well as a talk show panelist and studio engineer. He also co-hosted the DSD Podcast from 2009 to 2011, in which he interviewed more than 100 athletes and journalists. More recently, Fischman appeared as a panelist on Trojan Vision’s PlatForum Sports, a half hour sports talk show on SC’s television station.
Most recently, he maintained college athletics websites for CBS Interactive and wrote and edited stories for ESPN True Hoop’s Cowbell Kingdom (Sacramento Kings blog), Vantage Sports (professional basketball analytics) and Ozy (a forward-looking, Silicon Valley-based news site). Before those opportunities arose, he wrote and edited feature stories for the ATLX Channel, a sports and fitness start-up.
Fischman thoroughly enjoys beat reporting and writing and editing sports features, but he derives a certain type of joy from producing long-form projects. He has edited three books in recent years. In 2015, Fischman copy-edited the English translation of Ilko Minev’s “As Flowers Go” (originally in Portuguese). Then, in the fall of ’19, he served as full editor for Paul Knepper’s “The Knicks of the Nineties,” working with story structure, format consistency, syntax and misspellings. Most recently, he edited David Ostrowsky’s full-length biography of Hall of Fame second baseman Roberto Alomar, which came out in February 2024.
One of his favorite sports books is “Pacific Rims” by Rafe Bartholomew. Bartholomew traveled to the Philippines to chronicle the country’s love affair with the game of basketball. In doing so, he explored not only the game, but many other societal issues such as government corruption, poverty and how individuals craft and navigate through their cultural and personal identities. Like Bartholomew’s, Fischman’s book tells an unforgettable international and cultural tale by allowing a particular sport to drive the narrative.
