Lacking layout experience

Recent graduate trying to get hired as a sports journalist. Unfortunately, I am late in the game. My degree is not in journalism and all of my experience is online. I got the opportunity to start covering my school teams for the Scout.com network and eventually switched to 247Sports. I am now the lead recruiting writer for South Carolina's 247Sports site.

I enjoy what I do but recruiting isn't what I want to do full time. I have covered numerous events as a stringer for several papers but my lack of experience designing layouts is really preventing from getting a job.

Does anyone have any suggestions as far as what I could do to learn how do to this without working at a newspaper? Internships aren't really a possibility for me. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

Learning the basics of Adobe's design suite really shouldn't be hard, just expensive unless you know how to get a crack code or have access to it in some other way. You can find online tutorials. But print layout is so simple and drifting toward irrelevance. Try to also learn Photoshop, which can be very helpful online.

 

Off topic, but why sports journalism? Was your college major useless compared to journalism?

 

Pursue a job in your chosen field that you got a degree in.