{"id":127,"date":"2011-12-11T10:49:28","date_gmt":"2011-12-11T15:49:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/?p=127"},"modified":"2011-12-11T10:49:28","modified_gmt":"2011-12-11T15:49:28","slug":"when-you-least-expect-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/2011\/12\/11\/when-you-least-expect-it\/","title":{"rendered":"When You Least Expect it…."},"content":{"rendered":"

You never know when you’ll be called on to cover a big story whether you’re covering a team day to day, working in a television newsroom or even doing feature writing….What might start out simple enough can easily break wide open….Just ask Bob Hohler<\/a> of the Boston Globe and George Smith<\/a> of ESPN, who recently were part of a sports journalism seminar at Boston University…<\/p>\n

Hohler was one of a number of baseball reporters, editors and managers at the Globe who met one day to dive more deeply into the Red Sox collapse of 2011…A veteran reporter with investigative skills, Hohler had heard rumors and began to dig….Unless you’ve been under a rock these last two months, the resulting column of October 12th was the bombshell of the year until the Penn State and Syracuse sexual abuse stories came to light…”Some of it was very eye opening said Hohler, very disturbing for me because I didn’t want to confront him (Terry Francona) with this stuff but that’s part of the job…We wouldn’t have gone with this stuff unless we had really solid reputable sources, more than one, more than two”<\/p>\n

But doing investigative research on a story, over time, a reporter is bound to cover bits of information never heard before…<\/p>\n

For Smith it was different…He found himself on the hot seat just days after going to work at the Worldwide Leader…”The first story I ever did at ESPN, well i had just moved to Chicago and I was in my apartment, they call me up, get to Wrigley, Sammy Sosa, corked bat…I had no idea what they were talking about…Thirty minutes after I get there I was interviewing Sammy Sosa live on the field…You formulate your questions you think you need to ask, try not to look stupid while you;re doing it and just think of all the questions anyone would ask if they were put in a similar situation.”<\/p>\n

One thing both reporters have in common might be best characterized as the “after effect”…Smith, as someone who is dropped into a story, might not see his original interview subject again or months…Hohler, while now a reporter who does longer form pieces, covered the Red Sox on a daily basis a while back…But both know they are likely to hear about whatever it is they write or say, the next time they meet face to face…” I told everybody,\u00a0\u00a0I pretty much burned my bridges over there. \u00a0Josh Beckett isn’t going to be talking to me, John Lester either”<\/p>\n

But regardless, whether the story slaps you in the face or leaks slowly after days and weeks of hard work, these are the stories you earn your reputation on(for)… \u00a0You never know when they will present themselves…Be hopeful it’s more often than not…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You never know when you’ll be called on to cover a big story whether you’re covering a team day to day, working in a television newsroom or even doing feature writing….What might start out simple enough can easily break wide open….Just ask Bob Hohler of the Boston Globe and George Smith of ESPN, who recently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":901,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/901"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":131,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127\/revisions\/131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}