St. Pete’s Lesley Young is one of the country’s biggest players when it comes to sports broadcasting and production. Now, she wants to turn her lens onto the city she loves.
The founder of Greyline Media, based out of St. Petersburg, Young has spent the last 15 years in sports broadcasting and cinematography, having worked for years at ESPN on primetime games early in her career before venturing out on her own (and back to the Florida sunshine). Young’s work has taken her all over the globe to some of the sporting world’s biggest stages, and her annual experience telling stories and showcasing the athletes at the U.S. Open for tennis ranks among her favorite regular gigs.
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But as great as her travels and successes have been, Young sees one thing missing from her experiences: home.
“I’m local to St. Pete, but I’ve never done any work for locals in St. Pete,” Young said. “In my head I’m like, this makes no sense.”
Greyline Media harbors a passion for storytelling
Young founded Greyline Media in 2019 with the mission of not just creating visually-appealing content, but using a team to really tell the stories of the clients and people they work with. That ethos has informed the work they’ve done for national productions, and now it is driving the desire to tell the stories of their neighbors, friends and fellow St. Pete residents. From mom-and-pop cafes to the area’s most successful big companies, Young is determined for Greyline Media to give voice and vision to those who want their story told.
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While the company has worked largely in the world of sports, Greyline’s talent lies far beyond highlight reels and action scenes. An old football adage says “it’s not the Xs and Os, it’s the Jimmies and Joes.” For Young and Greyline, the idea holds true: it’s all about the people.
The people in question can be doing anything, sport just happens to be the industry in which Young and her team developed their chops. No matter what the person or business is centered on, for Greyline, it’s all about who they are, how they got there, and where they’re going from here.
“Everyone has a story worth telling,” Young explained, “and we’re the team that can tell it.”
That ability and passion for shining a light on stories is in fact what led to the name Young chose for her production company. A “greyline” is the narrow band of dusk and dawn that separates the areas in daylight from those in darkness throughout the world. Like any good Floridian, Young loves sunrises and sunsets.
Drive, hard work fueled Young’s rise in the ranks
Young’s success in the business is a story all on its own. If video production as a whole is a male-dominated industry, the world of sports production is doubly so. Perhaps triple or quadruple, truth be told, especially when Young entered the game back in the mid-2000s.
A longtime soccer player whose career ended after an ACL tear in high school, Young initially planned to study exercise and science physiology. The idea was to stay close to the game, and she’d certainly had personal experience in how important rehab is for athletes.
However, she quickly discovered her preference for telling stories instead of being in them herself. Young changed her major and earned a degree in sports production at Florida State, where she got her first jobs as a student working the endzone camera at Seminole football games and the first base camera in the baseball stadium.
After an internship with ESPN turned into a full-time job with the worldwide leader in sports, Young’s career took off. She learned the nuts and bolts in Bristol, and after four years, she set out on her own to follow her passion and take on projects she loved.
Her biggest break came in 2017 when she was asked to come in as a freelancer for the U.S Open. Always driven and determined to succeed, Young took to the job with gusto, doing the job of several people all on her own. Impressed by her work, the U.S. Open has brought her back every year since and her one-man band has grown to a team of 30-plus.
Greyline thrilled to call St. Pete home
The growing success Young had as a freelancer led to the founding and creation of Greyline Media, the assembly of a team with a deep well of experience and a talent for telling stories of any background. It is unsurprising then that the company calls St. Pete home, a city rife with color and character, full of life, charm and individual tales waiting to be spun.
As she turns her focus to the Sunshine City, Young is excited to provide the same service for St. Pete that she has to so many others nationwide. In a relationship-driven industry, it’s the personalized one-on-one treatment that Young considers so vital for her company to deliver.
“What’s really important to me is our reputation and how we treat our clients,” she said. “Because they’re repeat clients. I think that’s really important in business. Whether it’s a small budget or large budget, we work just as hard.”
To learn more about Greyline Media and the services offered, visit greylinemedia.com.
This article was produced in partnership with Greyline Media.
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