Breaking into the Business. What to do?

Good to hear man. And don't pass it up just because it isn't sports. Even if it's the wrong foot, it's still a foot in the door.

My advice if you get the job..... Tell the sports editor you're willing to pitch in to cover stuff where needed on your off days. You might not be able to get away with being paid as a stringer on your off days but it wouldn't hurt to ask. But if not, do it for free. Sports guys are going to get sick. They're going to go on vacation. They're going to get shorthanded. Practically every paper in America is short-staffed right now. Let him know you're ready and willing and you'll get some sports clips. Do this as much as possible for a couple years, build up your clips file and resume and then start hunting for the next stop.

In the meantime, try not to fall asleep at all the government bullshit you'll be covering. Good luck man.

 

Best of luck, both with getting the foot in the door, and with then getting to where you really want to be.

And I'll echo Mr. Dangles. I wasn't even in college, I had another job as a customer service rep, but I started stringing Friday Night Football for the paper I'm still at, and never turned anything down once football season ended.

After they helped me along and made me a better writer, I picked up prep beats as a freelancer, and eventually got brought onto the staff. As long as you put the work in, you can make it work.

 

Congrats if you get it.

If you're covering courts and city matters, make friends and network. Keep every phone number and email address. Learn to navigate the system. Learn about obtaining documents and what's important about them. Make friends with lawyers, firemen, cops, department heads, people in the clerk's office and most of all, the secretaries.

Secretaries are the gatekeepers. If you piss off the secretary you're typically screwed. Ever see "All the President's Men" when Bernstein goes to Miami and sits in the office all day? They can do that to you.

Good luck and beat the bushes if you get the job.

 

Boyznblu80,

My advice: Do not consider a news-side job to be bad news.

There are many more of those jobs than sports jobs in this business. And, there are many, many things, if you learn to do them on the news side, and you learn to do them well, that will stand you in good stead if/when you ever move over to sports, or any other department.

It is invaluable to know how/when/whom to approach, reach and network with when it comes to courts, police and government. It helps immeasurably to know what you're doing and to know your way around when you someday go into into a courthouse to ask for background/information/updates on cases that, one day, may apply to that coach who's been arrested and charged with unlawful sexual relations with a minor, or that athlete who got caught driving while intoxicated, or who has been charged with stealing thousands of dollars worth of store merchandise, etc.

It is helpful to have made friends with police/government contacts and to have learned and to know how to enforce the FOIA rights for that time in sports, or some other department, when you go after that tough investigative but meaty story that needs such in-depth reporting to supply the meat.

It to your benefit to learn how to work with and get around real, official and sometimes legitimate stonewalling, as opposed to just some coach being a jerk.

It behooves you to make yourself as valuable as possible in a newsroom, and being able to legitimately tackle any tough news-side assignment will do that.

You also may just find that you like and realize the importance and impact of dealing with all the really important, real-life events and issues that tend to come out of working news. Dig those up and executive strong stories on those, and you will certainly be able to do it, all the better, in sports. You need to use the same skills in news as you do in sports -- only they will need to be sharper/better, and they will be made so, too.

That's a good thing, and will make you someone to reckon with, whatever beat or department you end up in in the future.

 

I second golfnut's advice, both the quoted part above and his other posts in this thread. Lots of other good nuggets of advice throughout this thread.
This is my second stint at a weekly, after two previous stints at smallish dailies and about five years of freelancing. Hopefully you get this job. If you do, realize you're lucky and that this is a great opportunity, sports or no sports. I've met plenty of journalists who look down upon weeklies, but after being on both sides of the desk I can honestly say I much prefer being at a weekly. Pay sucks, hours are long, vacations are just a dream, but from my experience it's the same at weekly and daily papers.
Keep a positive outlook, and you might find you actually like the non-sports stuff at a weekly. It never hurts to chat up the sports guys to see if they need help, and for that matter see if anyone else needs help. News, schools, photo, whatever. The more you try and the more things you get experience at, the better off you'll be down the road.
Not many people mentioned this (I think just a couple), but I would say learn photography. Versatility is good, and if you get enough experience at it the sports editor may just come asking for your help more. It would be especially nice if the paper has its own camera gear, but if not you can get a pretty decent camera cheap. It's not too hard to find an old Nikon D1H for under $200.

 

I can't say it any better than WriteThinking did, but I just want to reiterate to you that you need to embrace this. Cops can involve life-or-death. From a storytelling standpoint, courts have the same dramatic tension as sporting events - two sides pitted against each other, the stakes increasing as things move along. You're going to learn to be a real journalist, something you can do on sports, too, but that you can also more easily navigate around if you want. Embrace every second of it. You might love it. The Pulitzer Prize winners lists are littered with people who got fortuitously tossed into some beat or another to start off.

 

Good advice all around. Random question. How many of you took reporter exams during the interview process? One part was taking a reporters notes and created seven or eight graph story out of it. The two other parts were copy editing and a "create a feature lede" out of the info provided. It wasn't rocket science, but I was surprised that the paper did it. Everywhere else I applied it was just straight up interview then "we'll let you know some time soon" deal. I am surprised more places don't do this. I know ESPN, Newsday, etc have tests too. But has anyone else run into this at smaller places?

 

Yeah when I was first coming out of college I interviewed at a tiny paper -- ciculation was like 7,000 -- and they gave me a box score and some game notes and gave me 30 minutes to write a story of a certain length to simulate deadline pressure.

Another place I interviewed for sent me to actually cover a game for them as part of my interview.

Other places were just an AP test. All depends. Some places do more extensive interviewing than others. You never know what they may have you do.

 

An old friend of mine who used to be an editor for a relatively large-sized paper in the Boston area once told me this: "Be an expert in a sport people don't know much about," i.e. tennis, volleyball, white water rafting, archery, swimming, hunting, etc. He believes (and I believe him because I feel the same way) that most aspiring sports writers want to cover the four major sports: baseball, football, basketball, and hockey, but could care less about all the other "crap." If you become an expert on just one of those "random" sports, perhaps you can find a niche, and from there, progress.

That's just his theory, but needless to say, I've taken his advice and have picked up some rather nice freelance work for nationally recognized volleyball and field hockey publications.

 

I got one of those tests when I was interviewing for a clerkship, and I still give that test today. It shows me how they write and if they know sports and can handle a deadline. Someone I worked with also included in his questions "Explain the infield fly rule."

And like the choir keeps saying: News experience helps your sports. I've been on both sides, and just happen to prefer sports, but i still use things I learned on news side every day.

 

Boyz,

I graduated in April 2009, and after applying everywhere I could for the entire summer, I got lucky and got a newspaper job for a lot more money than I was expecting for an entry-level reporter. I don't have time to read all these posts, but I hope you have been taking the advice of those who told you apply EVERYWHERE. The worst anyone can do to you is say, "no". If that happens, life hasn't changed and you move on. But if you pick and choose where you think you'd like to work and what you'd like to do, you're going to be waiting for a long time.

As far as the "tests" go, every single one of the 25 interviews I had with papers gave me at least one "test". Most of them gave me a story writing test, a pop culture test, a grammar test, and then a spelling test. One paper gave me 7!

I also wanted to say something about not working in sports: like everyone said, experience anywhere in a paper helps your resume. It shows future bosses that you're willing to do anything to be successful. Also, if you get a story that might be boring on the surface, but make it well-written and interesting, you can basically say to an employer, "Look, if I can make this look interesting, I can make ANYTHING you throw at me interesting."

Best of luck to you!

 

At this point, news > sports.

Hours tend to be better. More jobs are available in news.

You can watch sports on the weekends.

Believe me, if you want to cover sports bad enough at a weekly, you'd eventually get your chance.