Vedant Gupta started his platform, Global Kid Media, when he was 11 years old. Six years later, he has conducted over 2,000 interviews with athletes and celebrities from Magic Johnson to Snoop Dogg, but it all began because of his passion for sports.
“I was the biggest sports fan in the world,” Gupta said. “I loved football, hockey, everything and I never saw young people represented…and as a young person I said, I want to be the first kind to break through and be on national television as a sideline reporter.”
The first event Gupta covered was the NCAA tournament in Detroit.
“From there, I started to experience a lot of adversity, a lot of people were telling me no to access…saying I had to wait until I was older,” he said. “I think that kind of made me want to push a little bit harder with Global Kid Media.”
From this point forward, Global Kid Media’s goal grew into an effort to get more kids involved in television and help them gain the skills to do so. It has also acted as a platform for Gupta to share his interviews and his story.
Many of the interviews he conducted were the result of long travels and waiting, due to continuing to be denied access to events and games.
“I had to do it the hard way,” Gupta said. “I used to stand outside stadiums for hours, sometimes in the cold in Michigan, just waiting for someone to walk out.”
He credits the grit and willingness to approach these big-name athletes to his young age.
“I was so naive when I first started and I think I used that to my advantage,” he said. “I didn’t care about the cameras, I didn’t care about anything else around me. I was like, there’s a coach or someone you watch on TV all your life and look up to, and here’s a chance to talk to him.”
The years of grinding to speak to anyone he could, even to athletes’ families, paid off when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and Gupta could no longer go out to stadiums and wait for interviews. Instead, he had to find a way to bring the interviews online.
“I kind of built a lot of contacts when COVID hit…so I started a virtual show,” he said. “That’s when I realized that your network really matters. I reached out to thousands of people and I was able to rack up one guest a day for 300 days or so.”
The guests that Gupta spoke to during COVID included television hosts and reporters like Nate Burleson and Jay Bilas, former and current athletes like JJ Redick and Mark Sanchez and many others. As he’s grown in his career, Gupta has become more appreciative of the people he is interviewing.
“Nobody’s better than another person. Every time matters…I’ve started to appreciate the journey of interviewing anybody,” he said. “Whether it’s a celebrity…or one of my favorite things to do is interview parents and meet the families of players.”
He also sought to tell uplifting stories through his interviews and make them comfortable for viewers, himself and whomever he was speaking to.
“I feel like so many times, in national news especially, there’s always some twisting in the media,” he said. “I said, if I want to do this, I want to do positive stories and I want to talk about this that the athletes want to talk about.”
Gupta sought to bring a different perspective to sports journalism and the lives of the athletes and coaches he was talking to.
“There’s enough people that will ask about stats, that will ask about different things related to the direct technicalities of the game,” he said. “But I want to know about your family, I want to know about what you do for fun, I want to know about your foundation.”
Through Global Kid Media, Gupta has taken a broadcast journalism role interviewing different people on camera and posting the videos to his social media. However, now that he is going into college, he is planning study the business side of his ventures and pursue entrepreneurship.
“I’ve kind of started to see how marketing works and through the journey of doing interviews…obviously (travel) is not free and I had to learn how to come up with business partners and sponsors and brands,” Gupta said.
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Now, Gupta will be going into his freshman year at Michigan State. While he is not closing the chapter on Global Kid Media, he plans to focus more on his book.
His book, “Global Kid Media – A kid entrepreneur’s time traveling journey” was recently released and he wants to continue marketing and selling the book.
“I never thought I’d have a book but my goal was to always inspire other young people that they could do this as well, this is the best way to do that, right?” Gupta said. “And I had all these stories to share.”
The book is thirteen chapters long, and it took Gupta two years to write and self-publish the book. Each chapter of the book focuses on a different life lesson that Gupta has learned through his childhood and early career.
After writing his book, Gupta began to apply to colleges and universities. During the application process, he hoped that his real world experience with Global Kid Media as well as the sports he played and AP classes he took would lend a hand.
“My GPA was 3.6, which for a lot of competitive schools, I mean I’m sure they look for 4.0 and above,” he said. “We discussed a lot, will I get accepted based on the real-world education that you think would correlate to the degree or would they look at the GPA?”
Out of the 19 schools Gupta applied to, he only received acceptance to Michigan State.
“Michigan State has always been a place that I wanted to be at; I’m really excited about that…but getting rejected from 18 other schools is a little harsh,” he said.
Despite the feeling of rejection, Gupta took the experience as an opportunity to learn and grow.
“I think anytime you get rejected or you feel you earn something, that’s the only way to learn,” he said. “The biggest thing I learned is just…I know a lot of people do things to look good for a college application but I think, do what you want to do. The things that you work on speaks for yourself. Control what you can control.”
Through his entire journey leading up to college, failure and success have both been integral to Gupta’s growth. Being able to manage everything is what he has been most proud of.
“There’s no interview specific thing that I’m really proud of. I think it’s just a journey, sticking through it,” he said. “I’m proud of the growth, understanding certain things, understanding how much failure is not something you should be afraid of. I think I’m proud of those types of mental accomplishments.”
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