Former SLCC Globe sports editor in NY Times

Gerald Narciso grew up reading Sports Illustrated, Time and People, gravitating toward features and human-interest stories.

Even in college, however, Narciso, 33, didn’t imagine he’d one day write stories that would appear in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and dozens of other newspapers, magazines and websites.

Narciso was born in Calgary, Canada, and at age 8 his family moved to Salt Lake City. He graduated from Judge Memorial Catholic High School. In 2003 he earned a degree in marketing from Westminster College.

Without any solid job prospects, he enrolled the following year in Salt Lake Community College to study graphic design. “I thought it would be a good compliment to my marketing degree from Westminster College,” he said.

Narciso started freelance writing while at SLCC, stringing for the Salt Lake Tribune as a high school basketball reporter. He also contributed to Utah Sports Magazine, Utahjazz.com and to the Arts and Entertainment and opinion sections of SLCC’s The Globe newspaper.

Narciso graduated in 2006 from SLCC with an associate’s degree in communication and an emphasis on print journalism. He was the sports editor at The Globe during his final year at SLCC.

“I had one of my favorite teachers and mentors I’ve ever had with (SLCC instructor) Nick Burns,” Narciso said.

From there initiative, skill and talent took over as he moved to Vancouver to work as a sports writer for Kidzworld.com and for the NBA publication Dime Magazine, which eventually brought him on full time and all the way to New York City in 2009.

That same year he began contributing to the New York Times, in which he’s been published about 15 times, he estimated. But with the rapidly changing and daunting face of print journalism in recent years, Narciso went in search of a safer career path.

By 2010 he was working as a media relations coordinator for British Columbia Institute of Technology in Vancouver. In February 2013 he took a job as a “brand journalist” for the global company Avigilon, which makes HD video surveillance products.”

“Now I work in content marketing, which is a trend for a lot of journalists nowadays,” Narciso said. “It allows me to stay creative, write and edit. It is kind of a good mix between my marketing and journalism backgrounds.”

One of Narciso’s most recent articles ran January 25, 2014 in the New York Times under the headline “Seahawks Mania Bigger Than U.S. Can Contain,” a pre-Super Bowl story about the Seattle Seahawks’ popularity in Vancouver and throughout British Columbia even in years prior to the 2014 NFL Championship Game.