Sports journalism is like anything else these days, there’s some good news and some bad…Surprisingly , jobs are more plentiful now and finding them is even easier(getting them is another story for another day)…But let’s be clear, while there’s something for everyone, to be a “pro” at it takes time and creativity…<\/p>\n
So, when\u00a0Scott Lauber<\/a> of the Boston Herald<\/em> and Marc Normandin<\/a>\u00a0from SB Nation<\/em> joined us for the inaugural sports journalism seminar this semester, I hoped we could establish some basic ground rules about where sports journalism was in 2015…On the heels of Media Day at the Super Bowl it seemed like there were no rules…The National Football League issued more than 5,500 credentials and it looked and felt like they were all there packed into the U.S. Airways Center…<\/p>\n But was that journalism?….USA Today<\/em> devoted an entire column to the “Goofiest Reporters”<\/a>…Bleacher Report<\/em> packaged a feature on Ines Sainz<\/a>, not even Bill Simmons<\/a> could resist… How did we get to this point?…Lauber explains it this way: “Sports are entertainment…I think that there’s a danger, especially nowadays of taking it too seriously…It’s sports, it’s a game, it’s fun but it’s very easy to take all of the fun out of the game.”…Certainly “Deflate-gate” did just that as did the NFL’s ongoing domestic abuse issues all season long…But covering those issues can’t just be sloughed off as “taking it too seriously”…The key is, it’s a story and your job is to tell it…<\/p>\n Therein lies the key, it says on this page…As a journalist you have to decide what gets told, how it gets told and even “if” it gets told…Not everything you hear will be true, not everything you’re told will be accurate, not everything someone whispers in your ear really happened…Thankfully, with the playing of Super Bowl 49, “Deflate-gate” goes away (until that one day when Roger Goodell issues a press release fining the New England Patriots and we have that<\/em> day’s story)…As a journalist you’re trying to establish yourself as someone readers\/viewers can trust…You are their link to the events they hold so precious…Perhaps Normandin put it best when he told the students, “We’ve kind of learned what we should be covering, how far we should extend ourselves and when there are times when we have to say ‘no, let’s keep on working on something bigger, that we’re prouder of, that we think is going to do very well. so, you have to learn the point ‘that’s enough.”…Very well said Marc…this is crucial for journalists just starting out…weaving their way through what seems like a morass of information and trying to decide how to deliver it…<\/p>\n It’s all a process, it starts slowly and hopefully builds…And the only way to figure it out is to practice at it, “do it” on whatever platform you can…for the school newspaper, your own blog, your class assignments, if that’s what it takes…Lauber gave this advice, “Go to a game, write a good story about a player, something particular that happened. \u00a0Learn to write and there’s a career for you.”<\/p>\n Maybe that’s the key to where we are in 2015…it doesn’t have to always be hard hitting, entertaining journalism has its place…But the people who are doing it have succeeded because their writing and their storytelling are exceptional…And better still, you’ll make a career of it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sports journalism is like anything else these days, there’s some good news and some bad…Surprisingly , jobs are more plentiful now and finding them is even easier(getting them is another story for another day)…But let’s be clear, while there’s something for everyone, to be a “pro” at it takes time and creativity… So, when\u00a0Scott Lauber […]<\/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\/268"}],"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=268"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":270,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions\/270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}