Paul Schwartz’s love of sports was kindled by nights spent watching basketball games with his father some 50 years ago.  

The most memorable games were the close ones, the anxiety-laced buzzer beaters. They make for the best stories, according to Schwartz. One in particular stands out.

It was game seven of the 1971 NBA playoffs. The New York Knicks were playing the now-defunct Baltimore Bullets. And this game, Schwartz says, was very close. He remembers staring at the screen of their RCA XL television alongside his father, Jack Schwartz, both breathing heavily, in his childhood home of Lynbrook, Long Island, as Bill Bradley’s final game-tying shot was blocked by Wes Unseld, knocking the Knicks out of the playoffs. The final score was 93 to 91. Schwartz was 11 at the time.

“We were in the living room. It was kind of dark, we were watching, and my mother walked in and started saying something, and we both started yelling at her, like, ‘Not now, not now!’” he laughs.

It’s the ability to recall moments like this that’s helped Schwartz forge his career in sports journalism. He has been the New York Giants reporter for the New York Post since 1994, an impressive tenure in a media industry in constant flux. Before the Post, he worked for the Middletown Times Herald-Record and the Albany Times Union for a few years after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1981 from the University at Albany. In 2015, Schwartz received an Alumni Excellence Award.

The change he’s seen over the decades feels almost surreal, Schwartz says.  

At the beginning of his career, he’d conduct interviews after the game in the locker room, where  there were no cameras except for the occasional local TV crew shooting for the 11 p.m. news. When sports fans opened the paper the next morning, it was his story about last night’s game that they read.  

“Now, if I’m in the locker room, someone may have a video posted within a minute and a half,” he says. “Our business is different.”

Yet some things have stayed the same.  Schwartz says the tenets of being a successful beat writer have remained constant: Be on time. Be aware. Make connections. Develop sources. Reporters still need to understand what the story is and know how to tell it.  

“It’s not a lot different,” he says. “We just have to distribute a lot of it a lot faster, and some of the format is different.”

Social media platforms like X, formerly known as Twitter, have played a big role in the change of pace, and artificial intelligence is ushering in even more transformations. Schwartz is active on social media and now hosts the “Blue Rush” podcast about the Giants for the Post. He knows there are some publications using AI to write sports stories, but he believes his readers value his stories for their accuracy and insights.

“AI cannot produce a lot of the things I produce because what I produce is based off information that I have from sources,” Schwartz says. “I would rather be right than be first.”

These rapid changes to the industry can be concerning, Schwartz admits, but he doesn’t have a pessimistic view of journalism. In fact, he has hope for the next generation of journalists, including his son, Jared, who is now also a sportswriter at the New York Post.  

“I always tagged along with him as much as I could,” said Jared, recalling memories from when the New York Giants held its summer training camp at the University at Albany. There, he met players and had access to the media room. “That was my first experience of being around the beat and being around other writers, and I liked it.”  

Schwartz never pushed his career on his young son, one of two children he has with his wife, Jutta, who graduated from the University four years after him.  

With all the transformations in the media industry and throughout his career, there’s still one constant that gives Schwartz comfort: talking about sports with his father, who is now 97 and living in Boca Raton, Florida — one of a handful of Southern cities where print copies of the New York Post are distributed. They talk every day on the phone.

“All these years later, it’s still the same,” he says. “We talk sports all the time.”