{"id":417,"date":"2017-04-30T09:00:49","date_gmt":"2017-04-30T13:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/?p=417"},"modified":"2017-04-30T09:00:49","modified_gmt":"2017-04-30T13:00:49","slug":"how-big-is-big","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/2017\/04\/30\/how-big-is-big\/","title":{"rendered":"How Big is Big…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Covering high school and local sports isn’t quite the same as going to the Super Bowl four times, the World Series three times, the Stanley Cup Finals twice, the N-B-A finals four times or the Olympics…But on your road up the sports journalism ladder you’d be wise to treat it that way…Because to the people who are involved, it’s just as important…<\/p>\n

For aspiring journalists working on the student paper, radio or television station, a Beanpot final or an occasional League tournament might just be as big as it gets….Those rare N-C-A-A appearances are to be savored…Just ask the pair of \u00a0announcers from W-T-B-U who got to go to Fargo, North Dakota this year…<\/p>\n

You rise to the occasion…<\/p>\n

“If you treat an assignment like its just run of the mill, another thing and you mail it in, the readers will know almost immediately and they’ll tune out and they’re not gonna read you”…So said Greg Bedard<\/a> this week at the final edition of the 2017 Boston University Sports Journalism Seminar Series…That just happened to be the answer to my very first question and when I heard his answer I felt like I had gotten my point across and the seminar could have ended there…<\/p>\n

It’s not as if you have to make every story big, but it’s important to find those nuggets, go behind the x’s and o’s and most importantly, inform your readers…<\/p>\n

As the season goes along, the games get bigger (usually)….they determine what is often termed a successful season…and as such, they draw attention…Like athletes, journalists need to learn how to pace themselves, how to sometimes NOT make every game, every play seem like it was an “instant classic”…That’s not always easy, taking individual events into play but it’s almost as if you have to detach yourself from the game…”They (veteran reporters) have a poker face”, Bedard told the audience, “nothing phases them…especially on deadline, you have to keep your cool, you have a job to do.”<\/p>\n

While I know students love war stories and want to be connected to the events they hope to some day cover, I sometimes struggle with “bringing them into the tent” fully…Thus i didn’t press Bedard when he talked about not really caring about the outcome of the game he might be covering….It sounds jaded perhaps, but the harsh reality is, it becomes a job…More times than not, better than any other you’ll ever have…In the television news business there’s a saying, “we don’t care who wins, just get it over by air time” …(editors note-stations can’t use highlights of a game until it’s over and there’s nothing worse than doing a sportscast and having to tell the audience what happened instead of showing them.)…Everyone says to themselves that will never happen to me…Work the beat for thirty, forty years in my case, and watch…It just happens…But I digress…<\/p>\n

The other issue that jumped out at me as a result of our discussion was offered by Ben Watanabe<\/a>, one of the Senior Editors at NESN.Com who also joined us…Watanabe hires many young journalists and he’s found that there’s a correlation between deadlines and the internet, and not always a positive one…”Writers that I see coming out now that have only written for the web are not as comfortable with it (deadlines), game ends you get twelve minutes to get it (your story) in. I don’t know that they get it drilled into them that there is a deadline”<\/p>\n

So don’t get too high, don’t get too low…Every story is a big one to somebody…Tell ’em something they don’t already know and you’ll do just fine…<\/p>\n

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Covering high school and local sports isn’t quite the same as going to the Super Bowl four times, the World Series three times, the Stanley Cup Finals twice, the N-B-A finals four times or the Olympics…But on your road up the sports journalism ladder you’d be wise to treat it that way…Because to the people […]<\/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\/417"}],"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=417"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":420,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417\/revisions\/420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bu.edu\/fshorr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}