Career Advice For An Aspiring Sports Broadcast Journalist
This past week I had the chance to speak to a young aspiring sports journalist and offer him some career advice.
My niece graduated high school last weekend. I traveled to the west coast for her commencement and met a young man at the graduation party that my brother and sister-in-law threw for her. I was talking with the young man’s father and, when he found out that I do media production work, he called his son over to introduce himself. When the young man explained his desire to be in sports broadcasting, I gave him some advice about breaking into the business which I think is relevant to people well beyond the world of sports broadcasting.
Develop Your Own Audience
The world of broadcasting revolves around gathering together a large number of demographically targeted audience members and then selling access to their attention. This is true of television, magazines, and even the good old Internet. Advertisers pay for access to targeted audiences and broadcasters are constantly trying to find ways to capture the attention of audiences. They hire big name talent for their shows to try and attract their fans to become regular viewers. They monitor the Nielson ratings to check their market share and audience estimates and demographics. This data influences the prices they can charge advertisers for commercial time during their shows.
In magazines, the same thing goes on. The magazine tries to win an audience and then sell ad space around the articles. On websites, people post videos, audio, text and images in the hopes of attracting visitors and then place advertisements around the content to promote products to the audience. It’s the backbone of Google’s ad system.
The best way to become a powerful player in this world is to build your own loyal audience.
My Career Advice
I advised this young man to immediately start a blog and begin writing about whichever sports he was interested in. He had the good fortune of being friends with a talented baseball player who had just been drafted into the farm team system. I advised him to interview his friend and write about him on the blog.
Another recommendation was to become THE local journalist covering the sports teams at whichever college he attended. If there are more schools in the area, he should cover them all. I told him to interview coaches, players and fans. Write articles, record videos and audios and post them on his website. And, most importantly, start gathering an audience.
The Internet makes it cheap and easy to start publishing. The tools to do the job well can be had for pennies per day. It is also easy to gather contact information from your fans so that you can communicate with them through emails and newsletters. Online publishers can easily track which resources are popular with their audiences and interact with them through comments, polls and surveys.
There is no reason to wait for someone to give you permission to become a broadcaster, you only need to decide to do it and then get to work.
When this young man graduates college and begins looking for work in his field, he will be able to point potential employers to the large body of work that he has created. He can explain to them about the hundreds (or thousands) of loyal readers he has to his website and his work. Stack this up next to the resume of another applicant who only has coursework and demo recordings created in class and tell me which one will be more attractive to hire? If he develops a strong following, he may decide to skip the job search and start selling advertising on his website instead. There are many people earning a living this way.
Not Just For Sports Journalists
This advice is not just for aspiring sports journalists. I recommend the same advice to filmmakers, writers, musicians, and many other creative people. Building a loyal audience is the best investment for your business future. If you have a mailing list of 100,000 active gardeners, someone will pay you to advertise to them. Same goes for a host of other audiences. In my online marketing business, one of my key success strategies is to develop targeted mailing lists so that I can promote relevant goods and services to them for a commission.
So, don’t wait for someone to give you permission. Go out there and start building your audience!
P.S. Do you have something to add? Am I way off base? Don’t let me have the last word, leave a comment!
It’s true that we need to develop our own unique audiences for our work. What’s challenging is that it may be difficult at first to acquire interviews without any “credentials” as a journalist. I’d ask, “What publication are you writing for?” or “Who sent you?” If they see you’re just someone with a blog or website without any established base yet, they may not agree to interview.
No, you don’t need permission to become a sports journalist, but you do need to find someone to pay you for it. Otherwise, you will have to get an unrelated job that will sap your time and energy. I hope the young man doesn’t have to do that.
Ana,
Thanks for the comments.
This young man is on his way to college so his parents will still be providing most of his living expenses for the next few years. This is probably the best window of opportunity for him to do this kind of work to establish himself.
There is little chance that he’ll get pressbox credentials or access to big league players at this stage of his career. That is why I advised him to start reporting on his local college sports. Depending on the size of the school, he might be in classes with many of the players and gaining access to players and coaches at that level is possible. (It is not a big 10 school.) Plus, as I mentioned in the post, he is friends with a baseball pitcher who was just drafted into the minor leagues. This is a guy he goes to the movies with and he can start by getting an inside look at the life of an up-and-coming player. If he makes it to the majors, this journalist will be the first person to have interviewed him.
Also, I’m not suggesting that he should shun traditional journalism work. By all means, he should try to write for the school paper or one of the local papers (or an established website.) He should study the subject in school. But, if these opportunities don’t come quickly, he shouldn’t wait to begin gaining experience and building an audience for his work.
Becoming a full-time sports journalist isn’t going to be effortless, but building a track record and an audience will go a long way toward helping him become a better writer and giving him the leverage to pursue bigger and better opportunities.
The Go-To Guy!