I’m one of those people who came into college completely clueless on what to major in and what career to pursue. I tried everything, bouncing from major to major, and even though my GPA was decent, I gave some serious thought to dropping out of school until I realized what field I wanted to pursue.
Finally, as a second-semester junior, I decided to give journalism a shot. I’ve always been a relatively good writer, so news writing came pretty easily.
I’m now a senior at East Carolina, and I must say, the Bleacher Report Sportswriting Internship has been a catalyst to my level of excitement in the field of journalism. The internship has given me the opportunity to write about the sports I love, and now I’m extremely engaged and passionate about everything I do in my major at ECU.
Beyond sparking my enthusiasm for sports, the program has vastly improved my writing.
I print out every one of the article reviews I receive from my Feedback Editor, former intern Adam Fromal, and read them over before I start writing every morning. Between the reviews and writing for B/R almost every day, I can’t help noticing the transformation of my writing. I also try to read as many articles by other B/R interns as possible and have noticed a similar improvement in my peers.
I’ll be the first to admit it: I was skeptical about this internship when I first came across it. I was afraid writing subjectively would interfere with the objective news writing they teach us in journalism school.
But the internship gave me a vehicle to be subjective, a necessity for improving one’s writing. It taught me to think more outside the box, rather than just follow the upside-down pyramid approach that’s so repetitive.
The B/R internship gives us the opportunity to have our writing published on a national stage, and I believe that’s why our writing has improved 10-fold. We have to be careful to attribute correctly, get the facts straight and write well to improve not only our writing, but our reputations.
I know most of my peers were interested in this internship because it was something to put on a résumé. I felt the same way. But this internship is more important than just a résumé booster. It provides writers the opportunity to greatly enhance their portfolio.
When you apply for a job in this field, employers may glance over your transcript. They might even take a second to read your résumé. But what they really want to see is what you’ve actually done, the quality of your work. That’s how they will choose the best candidate for the job.
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David Cucchiara is an MLB Featured Columnist and an intern in B/R’s Fall class. Follow him on Twitter @cucch22.
Here’s some light reading that will make you at least chuckle a few times, maybe even laugh out loud in a way that makes your co-workers look at you like you’re nuts. Not that that happened to me or anything when I read it.
It’s Craig Silverman’s annual collection of “The best (and worst) media errors and corrections of 2012″ at Poynter.org.
You might giggle at the Economist for saying in a correction, “We must have been drunk on the job.” You might guffaw at a certain subhead in the Suffolk University newspaper.
But eventually, you ought to, like the editors at the Economist, get a little more sober. Some of these errors are really horrible. People lost jobs over some of them. Others brought pain to grieving families.
Any of us who don’t wind up in Silverman’s roundup in a given year ought to be grateful. There but for the grace of whatever we believe in goes any of us. And then if we’re smart, we’ll decide right then and there to be even more careful next year, so we don’t wind up in Silverman’s 2013 collection.
Hat tip to B/R NBA writer Kelly Scaletta for making me want to quit my job and go back to college—for free, from my couch—by pointing me to Coursera.org.
Coursera describes itself on its “About” page:
We are a social entrepreneurship company that partners with the top universities in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. We envision a future where the top universities are educating not only thousands of students, but millions. Our technology enables the best professors to teach tens or hundreds of thousands of students.
Through this, we hope to give everyone access to the world-class education that has so far been available only to a select few. We want to empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.
I’m one of those select few who had access to a world-class education, having gone to a very fine public university. And I’m still flipping over the possibilities at Coursera.
I’m not really going to quit my job, but I’ve spent most of the last dozen years or so, the time I’ve been acutely interested in the statistical revolution in baseball and other sports, wishing I’d taken that statistics class many of my college friends struggled with. Poor old econ majors, I used to think. Now I envy their facility with spreadsheets as I try to study some arcane baseball question.
So maybe I’ll take a stats class from Princeton, or one called Passion-driven Stats at Wesleyan. “In this project-based course,” the latter class description reads, “you will have the opportunity to answer a question that you feel passionately about through independent research based on existing data.”
Pre-requisites? “No background required. All are welcome.” That’s pretty standard for many of the courses listed at Coursera, of which there are 208 in progress or starting in the next few months, the website says. A similar site, EdX, has nine courses, with many more promised soon from Harvard, MIT, Georgetown, Wellesley, and the universities of Texas and California.
A lot of the courses available at Coursera are great for what college is great for: broadening your mind. History of the world since 1300, anyone? Back to Princeton we go. How does music work? Teach us, University of Florida.
But a lot of them also offer practical knowledge for professionals and aspirants, such as people in, just to pull one out of the hat, the sports media racket. Consider a pair of courses at Duke, opinion-piece writers: Sports and Society and How to Reason and Argue.
And here’s one at the University of Maryland that journalism pros—including veterans of one day—can benefit from: Surviving Disruptive Technologies.
I’m off to college, ma. Boola boola.
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Photo credit: Some dude who needs to take a photography class.
The Online News Association has been all over my Twitter timelines lately, reminding me what a great resource it is.
@ona is awesome! Look at this great list of #grants, #scholarships, #trainings and #workshops for #journalists: ow.ly/fVu0s
— April Deibert (@AprilDeibert) December 8, 2012
What April Diebert is so excited about in her tweet is this post packed with links for journalists and would-be journalists who want to learn or launch something.
That’s pretty typical of what you’ll find at the ONA’s site at Journalists.org. Another great recent post: Application tips from digital journalism pros.
The ONA also runs a Tumblr site, ONA Issues, that’s worth following. It’s a treasure trove of useful links about both issues and opportunities in journalism and journalism education.
Something ONA Issues noted recently was this post by Daniel Reimold at College Media Matters, listing what Reimold considers the top 50 undergraduate journalism programs in the U.S.
Here’s a short video from the Ryerson University School of Journalism in Toronto about a recent panel on the subject of breaking into the sportswriting business.
I like what Tas Melas of the The Basketball Jones had to say in an off-panel interview.
“Before you say you don’t like something in particular,” Melas said, “just try a few things, and then practice that craft and get really good at it. And if you’re not good at it, move on to something else.”
What I think he’s talking about is not embarking on your career with a preconceived notion about what it means to be a sports journalist, as in saying something like “I will be a writer of important prose pieces. I’m not interested in doing TV or video work.”
Keep an open mind and be flexible. That seems like a smart idea when you’re entering an industry that’s in extreme flux. What do you think you might be good at that you haven’t tried yet?
Unlike many of my fellow Bleacher Report writers, I didn’t grow up as much of a sports fan. I don’t consider the WWE to be a sport, so the NHL was about the extent of my sports knowledge.
I joined B/R in December 2011 as a WWE writer after B/R Featured Columnist John Canton had given me the inspiration to write about wrestling in my free time. I’d followed his work religiously and had always loved the idea about writing about the WWE.
Before long, I branched out and wrote about the NHL for the first time. I had fun with it and jumped right into contributing to the Washington Capitals section, covering events like the NHL Winter Classic and Stanley Cup Playoffs.
I became a WWE Featured Columnist in February and decided the next logical step in my career with B/R was to apply for the Sportswriting Internship. I was accepted for the Fall term, so that I could cover the NHL, though thanks to the lockout, that hasn’t worked out as I’d hoped.
One of the best things the internship has provided me with is the opportunity to step out of my comfort zone and expand my horizons.
The on-call days have given me that chance. I’ve never been into sports other than hockey, but I was presented with the challenge of covering football, soccer and baseball. With the appropriate amount of research, I was able to write articles I was proud of.
I’ve already gained a portfolio I’m happy with after a short time in the program, and not only have I proved to future employers that I’m capable of covering a multitude of sports—I’ve proved it to myself.
And let’s be honest: I wouldn’t get very far as a sports journalist strictly covering WWE and NHL.
I’m only a sophomore journalism student but I’ve already made great strides in my career. Completing three assignments on deadline and two on-call assignments each week has helped give me an insight into the ethics and professionalism of the business.
The feedback I’ve received has also helped my writing immensely. My Feedback Editor, Nick Houser, and I have been working closely to emphasize my strengths and improve my weaknesses. One of the most important things I’ve learned is how to write a strong lead.
The reads and medals on my B/R profile are nice, but they can only take me so far. The internship has given me valuable experience and all the tools to continue growing as a writer.
In less than a year, I’ve gone from covering the WWE and NHL exclusively to becoming a more versatile and talented writer than I could have imagined. I have the B/R Sportswriting Internship to thank for that.
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Michael Prunka is a WWE Featured Columnist and member of the Sportswriting Internship’s Fall class. Follow him on Twitter @MichaelPrunka
There’s been a lot of chatter in Journalism Nerdland over the announced demise of the Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s tablet-only newspaper.
It’s good stuff if you’re interested in the mechanics of where our little business is headed and what we’ve all learned from Murdoch’s 22-month experiment. But something Alexis Madrigal wrote on the Atlantic website caught my eye on a different subject, one of my favorites:
Leads.
We talk a lot around here about getting to the point quickly in your lead. Madrigal, using the Atlantic to illustrate a point about the Daily, writes a very good defense of doing just that:
There’s a classic longform convention in profiles of people. The writers tend to drop in to the story sitting with their subjects. They describe what they look like and provide some color about the situation: are they eating? how’d they get there? was the publicist a stickler? does the person appear to be on drugs? Sometimes we get a very short quote from the profilee that is indicative of the person’s affect and intellect. Then, the story, by which I mean the action, really begins. In particular, the stakes are explained lower down in the story, several grafs in. These description-rich ledes come first because that is how it is done (and it can be artful as hell when done perfectly).Well, we [at the Atlantic Online] found this sort of thing bombs for us over and over. Maybe we don’t profile the right people (disagree!). Maybe we’re terrible at writing these sorts of ledes (perhaps!). Or maybe, just maybe, the form doesn’t work very well to capture the attention of people who are clicking through from an email, IM, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Reddit. You just don’t know what’s happening for several hundred words in some cases. And before the writer answers why you’re reading, that person is gone.
That’s a point that can’t be made too many times. Here it is again, in video form.
Four years ago, while wasting away in an art sales job that I was neither good at nor remotely interested in, I ran across Bleacher Report while searching online for articles on the Cleveland Indians during my then-usual attempt to find a way to pass eight hours in the office without lapsing into a coma.
My interest piqued by a piece comparing Curtis Granderson and Grady Sizemore (Hello, 2007), I registered for the site and began posting comments. I then received a “call for entries email” from B/R for a contest asking writers to submit a piece on Super Bowl XLII.
Long a closeted, aspiring sportswriter whose work mostly consisted of pieces read only by immediate family and close friends and never published at all, I decided I’d give it a shot. After agonizing over the piece for days (and my roommate holding me at fork-point to force me to submit it), I finally gave in and posted it. The article ended up short-listed for the winning entry, and thus inspired me to keep writing for B/R.
I started as a contributor to an Indians roundtable run by another writer and occasionally producing solo content, and a year later I took over the roundtable and began writing regularly about the Indians and the Browns. I then spent two years as an Indians and Browns Featured Columnist, during which time I was able to pick up enough odds and ends of freelance sportswriting work to establish myself as a sportswriter and radio host, but not enough to pay the bills
Then, a year ago, I got a Facebook message from the COO of CineSport, the company that creates the video content for most major newspapers (New York Post, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, etc.), asking if I would be interested in interviewing for the Senior Sports Editor position at the company. I got the job on the spot, and have been with CineSport for just over a year.
I write original content, have the final edit on all written material produced by the company, am the contact person for the editors in chief of major newspapers all over the country and oversee a staff of junior writers and production assistants. Additionally, my radio show was picked up by ESPN and I’ve contributed freelance work to ESPN.com, NFL.com and the Cleveland Browns website.
I wish I could say I thought I got lucky, but the reality is that it took a really long time to establish myself to the point where I was targeted for such opportunities. I spent four years writing for free or for nominal fees. It was tedious, frustrating and financially difficult, but in the end, it paid off in spades.
And the reason it paid off? The exposure I got as a writer for Bleacher Report.
Both CineSport and ESPN contacted me because they found my work on B/R. I hadn’t applied for either job. The powers-that-be at these sports powerhouses were searching B/R, looking for job candidates.
It’s a good lesson for anyone frequently exasperated by the thought that plagues every amateur sportswriter: Is anyone with hiring power actually reading this stuff?
The answer, it turns out, is a definite yes.
I am eternally grateful to Bleacher Report for the opportunity it gave me to showcase my work. Through a combination of hard work on my part and the willingness of B/R to give its writers ample promotion, I now hold a senior position in sports media.
Oh, and the last two junior writers I hired at CineSport both had Bleacher Report writing backgrounds. It was the first place I looked when I needed to find new talent.
Truly, B/R gives as good as it gets. If you share your talents, hard work and sports knowledge, the site will in turn share your work with the world.
I know that at times, attempting to get a break as a sports journalist feels like being stuck on a treadmill, endlessly running but never getting anywhere.
Keep writing, and know that editors like me across the sports media world look first to B/R to find upcoming talent. Find what you’re passionate about. Write about it. And then someday, we’ll find you.
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Samantha Bunten is a Senior Sports Editor for CineSport. Follow her on Twitter @samanthabunten.
Here’s some happy reading for writers, aspiring and otherwise: Esquire culture columnist Stephen Marche argues that there has never been a better time to be a scribbler.
Writers are prospering as never before, on all levels. At the very pinnacle, J.K. Rowling is a billionaire. She is richer than the queen of England. A little lower down the scale, Tom Wolfe was paid $7 million for his last novel. Just to put that in perspective, Charles Dickens’s net worth when he died would be about $10 million today. And for writers starting out, there are more options, more means of access to the marketplace, than ever before.
People are reading more and buying more books than ever, Marche writes. All while writers—as is our wont—are complaining that people don’t buy books anymore and writers are doomed.
Marche mostly writes about novelists, but also points out that other forms of writing are thriving, with competition forcing publications to bring their best stuff.
“A massive process of literary rebirth is under way,” Marche writes. “Everyone seems to understand and accept this golden age except the writers themselves.”
Bleacher Report’s product and tech folks are working on improvements to the tools B/R writers use to create and publish their stories. They’ve asked me to pass along this survey, which they’re hoping you’ll use to tell them how they can make the tools work better for you.
The Survey Monkey survey only takes a couple of minutes to complete, and it would be a big help for our engineers as they try to help you.