fshorr's blog

The past two years most journalism professors have told me that my first job will be out in the middle of nowhere. For a guy who has never lived further than five miles of Boston, I didn’t want to hear it. Especially for a person who wants to go into sports journalism, why would I want to go anywhere else?

After listening to Jackie Pepper, who also grew up in a big market but had to move to Idaho, I started to realize that maybe I will just have to go somewhere other than Boston for a year or two. I’ll have to learn about a whole new place and the people that live there. You definitely have to do your homework because you are going to want to impress everyone. The people are going to know that you’re a newcomer but you don’t want to make it too obvious when you don’t know what you are talking about.

It was good to hear about Jackie’s experience when she first went out to Idaho and had to do most things by herself. You’re not going to have the resources you would have in a place like Boston. It’s a scary thing to think about since it could happen soon. However, I also feel better knowing that she got turned down three times by CSNNE because she wasn’t from Boston. Maybe that could work to my advantage in a few years.

Of course, I’m always holding out hope that I could be as fortunate as Jeff Howe and never have to leave Boston.

I think it’s important to be hearing this kind of advice from newcomers like Jackie Pepper and Jeff Howe. Even though Jeff is from the Boston area and Jackie isn’t, I think they both had valuable advice to give us. Jeff managed to make a name for himself in the Boston area right after he graduated, but Jackie has also found a career in Boston and she doesn’t have the same background as Jeff. It’s possible to make a name for yourself in a big city like Boston, as Jeff did, but it’s also possible to get a job here if you aren’t from the area, like Jackie.
I don’t think one background is better than the other, though. Jeff mentioned Jade McCarthy, one of the NESN Daily anchors. She was originally from Newton, moved around a bit and got experience, and now is back in Boston. She had to move away for some time before she could make it in the big market of Boston. Jackie had to go through the same process. Jeff did not. I’m not sure if it matters so much that she is on camera and Jeff isn’t, I think that it depends on the situation and it depends on the person. I think it could be beneficial to move away and cover a small market for TV, radio or print. Everyone needs to start somewhere, but sometimes doors open in the city that you are already in through internships or connections. I think it’s important to keep an open mind though, and if you have to move to nowheresville to do that then that is what you have to do to make it.
Every person who has spoken to us so far has told us that this isn’t an easy job. It’s a job that takes 110% every day. I think it’s important that they are telling us this because they are right. If we’re not willing to pack up and move for our careers, then we should find something else to do. It’s also good to hear this advice because we have to realize that when we’re out in the industry after college, we’re going back to the bottom of the totem pole. It’s important that we know that and it’s important that we remember that in reality, no job is beneath us because we’re at the bottom. Just last night at my NESN internship a colleague told me that he sees too many college kids who think they are the best and that kind of attitude doesn’t fly there. He reminded me that I need to be humble and take whatever opportunity I find once I graduate, and I think that Jeff and Jackie are sending the same message to us.

We all have dreams of where we want to be after college, and I think that Jackie and Jeff are good examples of how the combination of hard work and talent can get you wherever you want to go. On the one hand, Jeff pretty much has the dream job for a local guy, and he seems to really enjoy his work. He successfully utilized his opportunities in Lowell, UMass, and at the Metro in Boston to quickly rise through the ranks. Most people have to start in a smaller market, but he made the most of each opportunity and contact that he made in his young career. Additionally, he took advantage of the fact that he was raised in the area and thus knows the sports scene well. He stressed that we have a great resource on campus, The Daily Free Press, and if we use the opportunities we have waiting in front of us, it’s possible to make it where we want to be. Again, by maximizing what we have, we can go far.

On the other hand, Jackie came from outside Boston, which initially hindered her, but she used her extroversion to her advantage. By finding the VP of Comcast on Facebook and setting up an interview, she showed how a little creativity and guts can also get you where you want to be in this business. While in Idaho, she worked extremely hard as a “one-man band,” giving her both the experience and the toughness necessary to move up to the Boston market. Once she arrived here, she was able to overcome the challenge of being far away by working hard to catch up on the local scene, such as by studying up for the Beanpot all night. So like Jeff, she utilized the opportunities she had (even if the viewership in Idaho was small) and used her personality to her advantage.

Most importantly, both newcomers stressed that we’re not as good as we think we are coming out of college, and unless we remain humble, we won’t get very far. As Lia said, the attitude of “I’m the bees knees” doesn’t fly, so we need to take a reality check on ourselves. Work hard, make the most of your chances, and be outgoing, and you can enter big markets like Boston, even if you’re from out of town.

I was a senior in high school and my assignment in English class was to write a research paper on the career that I wanted to pursue. Knowing what I wanted to do was easy but the research really opened my eyes to what I was going to have to do to be successful.

I realized becoming a sports broadcaster, or anything involved with being on air with sports, was going to take a lot of work. And one of the first answers I got when I interviewed the local sports anchor was you will probably start in a small town in the middle of nowhere.

Five and half years later, that remains the same. This is an industry where there might not be much turnover in the top markets. And like Emily said, sports is still sports to these small markets. In fact, being the “one-man band” in a small market makes it that much more fun and exciting. That market knows you, they trust you and you do become part of their family. And being that one-man band will help any of us develop all sorts of skills. When you have to depend on yourself, its amazing what you can do. All of that experience will help you transition into the big market job you have always wanted.

As for being new on the scene, its all about confidence. We use to say on my baseball team, confidence not cockiness. Anytime you enter a new market, or anything new, there will be a learning curve and that’s the exciting part of it; immersing yourself into your role and becoming the best you can be. But its very important, as Lia mentioned, to understand your role. No one wants a smart-ass kid just out of college, they want a kid that knows what he wants to do, knows what he needs to do and will do it all with 150%.

My mom reminds me every day that I will not be making much money but the idea of working my way from a small town, maybe even Utica, NY, to a big market only makes the juices flow even more.

And maybe one day well see each other in Elmira, NY or Walla Walla, WA.

(typo from my fourth graph)
***…represent a glimmer of HOPE.

Being that we are all soon to become newcomers in whichever field we end up in, this seminar was great because it not only informed us of what we may experience, but also presented two totally different “newcomer” situations. I think it’s fair to say that 9/10 of us are going to end up taking a route similiar to Jackie, but bringing Jeff in shows that with the right breaks and hard work, it is possible to end up in a major market right off the bat.

Coming from a smaller city in Western Canada, I personally don’t find the idea of moving to the “middle of nowhere” as the worst possible starting point (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan doesn’t set the bar high). However, finding yourself in new surroundings can be daunting for anyone. Jackie told us that we will “suck” at first, but soon start to see improvement in the work we are putting out there. She believed that the small market is a good place to develop the skills you will need later on in your career, which makes perfect sense if you have the right attitude. I think the key at this stage, like Lia and Jake have already said, is being humble even with your fresh BU diploma in your back pocket. If you go into that sort of situation thinking you are better than everyone else, it will likely hinder you from learning as much as you can from the people who have been there longer and have experienced more then you.

One positive to the small market starting point is your ability to experiment on what works and what doesn’t. It also allows you to figure out if this is what you really want to do with your life (weeding out process). Jackie said that she ended up doing both news and sports when she was in Idaho. This caught my attention because for the longest time I thought I wanted to do sports journalism, but after some experience in news, I am starting to lean more that way. I know Jackie never said she thought she wanted to do news, but in the small market it seems like you are exposed to different areas of the media and are able to figure out what you want to do with the next 20-25 years of your life. It’s also good because you never know where or what you might find yourself covering. In my foreign reporting class, we just finished War Reporting for Cowards, by Chris Ayres, who wanted to be an entertainment reporter, but found himself embedded with US forces in Iraq. You never know, and having as much across the board experience as possible is never a bad thing.

It may not be the easiest profession to break into and there will defiantly be bumps along the way, but I think every journalist I’ve heard speak is quick to say that they have one of the greatest jobs in the world.

Similar to Joel, I’m not from a big city and I don’t mind the prospect of moving to the middle of nowhere–as long as there’s an airport less than an hour away. I interned at a local station over the summer and even the reporters and anchors there had to start somewhere smaller. I think there’s a difference between starting as an anchor, though, and starting from print. It seems the bigger you want to make it, the smaller you have to start. Anchors will go to a small town in the middle of nowhere to get experience and move up, as we’ve been learning for years that that is what happens.

Like Jackie said, she was in a very small market to start. She made her mistakes and learned invaluable lessons from the field. The reporters I worked with over the summer did the same. I’m from a fairly small city in Ohio (Youngstown), but one reporter told me about how she had to start in a really small town in the upper peninsula of Michigan. Another started in northern New York. And one started as a camera person.

But Jeff started in Boston. I think being from here definitely helped him in his career, but so did being in print. From there, his knowledge of Boston teams and their histories helped him get his on-air work. And it’s not that what he does is easier or less important. I think it’s just the nature of broadcast that in order to get a job, you need to start small. A big market isn’t going to hire someone right out of college because they won’t be ready for the job. A print writer might not start out at Sports Illustrated, but for people who want to stay local, it’s much easier.

I really enjoyed listening to Jackie and Jeff last week. It’s always great to hear from people in the business and it’s even better to hear success stories. Jackie especially made me a little more confident that I could get my dream job, and I won’t have to spend five years in rural Montana. Obviously it’s different for everyone, but she gave me a lot of hope.

The real message I got from this week is that there is no one route to making it to a big market. There is no checklist or set of instructions you need to follow to get where you want to go. We were presented with two people, in the same market, covering the same teams with polar opposite stories of how they got there. Jackie went to a market none of us had heard of, and spent over a year there. Jeff never left the market and gradually worked his way up the totem pole of popular sports new outlets. The biggest thing I got out of it was that we don’t have to narrow our career path to fit some supposed model to be successful. There is no model. You make your own.
If I can get a starting job in Boston or Philadelphia (where I’m from), than great, I’m taking it. If I have to go to some town I’ve never heard of, and need googlemaps to find, than great; I’ll pack my bags as soon as I get the call. The point is, we can’t close the door to any options that might be out there.
Other than that, a few other things resonated with me. Jackie’s story about basically being told she sucks before even starting her job really struck me. Both Jackie and Jeff talked about needing to be humble. I think we all need to realize we constantly recognize there is always room for improvement in our work, and we have to be opening to trying to improve ourselves. We can’t be afraid to step outside our comfort zone because we never know where our career might take us, and having experience in any area we can will never hurt. Jackie pictured herself as a sideline reporter. I think Jeff said he was a business major in college. Now look at where they both are.
Lastly, a thing we all have to remember is that both Jackie and Jeff were perfectly unashamed to say that they got where they are today through others taking a chance on them; Jeff with the Metro and Jackie with the Comcast VP. You can call it luck, you can call it good networking, or maybe a little(or a lot) of both, but the point I got out of it was to never close the door on anyone that could help us down the road, even if that road isn’t all that clear to us.

As a class, I think we took away from this last seminar the unfortunate short term outcome of the journalism industry. One has to start at the bottom before he or she can take the next step forward. It’s going to be very hard for a large number of us, upon graduation, to get a job in the city, especially if it involves broadcasting or even just reporting in the field. The small towns are simply not as desirable as the big city markets and therefore are a surplus of openings for eager, young kids like ourselves. I think Joe Haggerty made a good point about how to approach the journalist lifestyle in the class before this one though, “Do this stuff when you’re young and single and you can afford to burn out a little.”

The job and location we end up settling on when we graduate from Boston University will be the stepping stone and foundation in starting our lives. As Jackie Pepper said, we may discover that we don’t actually want to be journalists or sports journalists based on our experiences with our first jobs.

I think there certain benefits to starting one’s career in a small town setting. First, I think one learns to establish closer connections and ties with their community, simply because there are less people in a lot of these rural southeastern and mid-western towns than the major cities. For example, the local high school baseball team may not be the most interesting thing to cover in “No-where-ville, Iowa,” but it may be the only sports news one has to work with and consequently one just has to learn to accept and adapt to this. So, as a sports journalist in that town, one is going to know everyone on the team and sports information department because he or she has to in order to do their stories. On the flip side, you could start out in Boston (probably the best sports media scene) and have a number of options on what sports and teams you cover. As Fran pointed out, in cities such as Boston you have a tremendous number of resources available to you.

However, I don’t believe if one starts out in a city, he or she will become a better journalist necessarily. In a small town setting, such as Idaho Falls in Jackie’s case, one learns to go out of their comfort zone and conduct interviews with the locals on a more personal and conversational level. You can still do this in the city, but at the same time have more people to work with for interviews and it won’t kill your career if you don’t know the whole team. Essentially, I think one learns their most vital “people skills” in a small town setting.

Secondly, I think exposure to a small town media setting is good because it may end up being the profession one desires. Covering sports stories for only a certain number of hours per day may be enough pressure and stress for some broadcasters and journalists to handle. Each one of us has learned that it doesn’t get any easier once you get to the city, and free time becomes less and less in densely populated areas and large media markets. For a sports journalist hoping to raise a family some day, having a more low key life may be the right answer.

To return to the central issue, I don’t think one has to have a background or connection to a particular setting in order to work as a sports journalist in it. In this regard, I remember my transition to Boston University when I transferred here last year. I was going from the college town of Elon, NC (about 7,000 people) to the big city of Boston (about 650,000 people) and being slightly intimidated, but mainly excited to get to my new setting. Sure, I had a whole new school to learn about and more responsibilities to carry out, being farther away from home, but I learned to adapt. I was amazed how simple some things were to understand such as the subway system (nothing like New York City). Wanting to continue to do sports broadcasting at the student level, I decided to join WTBU sports with no prior experience in the station and without knowing any of the people. However, I talked and emailed back and forth with the sports director a little bit, mainly discussing my prior experience at the Elon student radio station, and was offered the position of men’s basketball beat reporter, the 2nd most prestigious beat to work on behind men’s ice hockey. In addition to this, I also had the privilege of being able to cover one of the women’s ice hockey games at the 2010 Beanpot.

Jackie Pepper’s situation sounded similar to mine. A California native, who had covered news in small town Idaho Falls, she still managed to make it to Boston, one of the more sports news inclined places in the country, if not the most. I think I learned from Jackie that your background and connections in a city aren’t always the deciding factor in the career world. With sports journalism, it depends on one’s versatility, drive, and experience as opposed to just one’s knowledge of a game or team, which can be learned, to make it.

Moreover, Emily’s point on “The Cluetrain Mainfesto” discusses this issue well. The people on the bottom layers of a company doing the “grunt” or “busy” work can be a lot more capable than the “top dogs” or CEO’s of a company or organization. I think this analogy compares well with the idea that a person, who doesn’t live or grow up in a particular area, may have more knowledge about certain aspects of it than a local who is there on a day-to-day basis. For instance, even though I live in North Carolina, I would say I have a much more extensive knowledge of my favorite hockey club, the New York Rangers, than many native fans. The reason for this is my drive and love for the New York Rangers, not because I live in New York City, or have the most extensive knowledge of it.

Overall, I’m mixed about entering the world of sports broadcast journalism and ending up in a small town setting. It was bright of Matt to quote Joe Haggerty on his point about the possibility of one being trapped in a small town media outlet. The competition for the big league jobs only continues to grow and sports broadcasting positions in major cities can be hard to come by. I can also say from growing up, living, and going to college in small town parts of North Carolina, a rural lifestyle isn’t the most interesting setting to be a sports broadcaster in. My hometown of Chapel Hill has about 50,000 people in it and I get bored there, which made it ironic that I ended up going to college for two years in an even smaller town. My goal is to broadcast hockey games for the New York Rangers, mainly because of the club, but because I love the immensity that is New York City too and know it would be a great place to be a journalist.

On the other hand, I would be willing to take a position in a small town if it meant I was covering the sport I love, hockey. If that involved starting out in some small town in Canada, I would be willing to do this if meant opportunities to work for one of the leagues (OHL, WHL, and QMJHL) that comprises the CHL or Canadian Major Junior Ice Hockey. The excitement of being able to cover the sport at this level might be enough for me to overcome the disadvantages of small town reporting.

For me the beauty of being in the sports business is to have the opportunity to travel to new places, and not be sitting at a desk in a stuffy office near the town you grew up in, working a 9 -to-5 job. LIke Tristan, I knew from high school that this is what I wanted to do, but also understood the sacrifices that came with it. I actually came to Boston for that very reason: a challenge in a new and unknown place. If anyone knows about learning to adapt, it’s a New York Yankees fan living in the heart of Red Sox Nation.

Although Jeff Howe might be able to finally write about his hometown heroes, I don’t necessarily see that as the greatest advantage. As aspiring sports journalists (or even working ones), it’s clear that we were fans first. With that being said, no matter how impartial we may attempt to be, there will always be some emotion attached with covering a hometown team. To me that is more difficult to assimilate to than learning the ins and outs of a new place. Jeff has to deal with a life-long relationship and history with a team that he loves, and do his job without getting emotions or personal opinions involved.

At the same time, building relationships and the trust of all those sources we are supposed to be able to call on at any given moment, seem impossible to come by in a place where you have no former connections.

I learned that first hand this summer with my internship with the Brockton Rox. I was the only non-Massachusetts native working on a staff of nearly thirty interns and front office staff. My accent (or lack thereof) was a dead give away and I quickly learned to brush up on my Boston sports. But after two weeks on the job, the level of my work outweighed the fact that I was from “the armpit of America.” I learned, just as Jackie explained, it’s the work, effort, and TONS of research that you put into the job that makes you stand out, not where you are from.

Although the task may have seemed daunting at first, Jackie Pepper managed to gain contacts and relationships, as well as a vast knowledge of the sports in Idaho after just one year. She showed that you can overcome the fear associated with working and living in a strange and unfamiliar new place.

The manner in which she attained her current job is even more telling though. Persistence is key. Maybe she was turned down three times, and maybe she had “no ties” to Boston sports, but it was her attitude and work ethic that got her that job.

Luckily for us, I do think the dot.com platform and the new 24-hour news cycle, as hectic and unnecessary as it may seem at times, will give us the opportunity to get jobs (in time) where we want to end up. In the long run, whether it is an opportunity with ABC’s new on-campus department or writing for an online blog, today’s technology and the knowledge we’ve taken from COM makes graduating seem a bit less overwhelming.