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The glamorous life of a sportswriter, Part a trillion

Discussion in 'Journalism topics only' started by Della9250, Dec 4, 2017.

  1. Doc Holliday

    Doc Holliday Well-Known Member

    This is such a good post in so many ways. Wish I had said this myself. I'm jealous, maumann.
     
    maumann likes this.
  2. Guy_Incognito

    Guy_Incognito Well-Known Member

    What if they run out of yogurt covered pretzels?
     
  3. Old Time Hockey

    Old Time Hockey Active Member


    100 percent agree with this — but (to my surprise) I learned there was one very big exception to this rule: The Olympics. Possibly because people are curious about the logistics of such a huge event, I found that not only did people want to know how the sausage was made, they sometimes seemed more interested in that than the actual sausage. When I'd get back from covering, no one wanted to talk about the events. They all wanted to talk about the little daily "postcard from wherever" reports which were largely about how things worked ... or didn't work.
     
    Last edited: Dec 8, 2017
    maumann likes this.
  4. Carlkolchak

    Carlkolchak Member

    "Nothing is ever as it seems. Rare is the mind that can discern what is carefully concealed within."
     
  5. Michael_ Gee

    Michael_ Gee Well-Known Member

    When I did the Olympics, I found the same thing. People love travel journalism, and those little postcards drew great interest -- except of course the ones I had write from Atlanta.
     
    Old Time Hockey likes this.
  6. stix

    stix Well-Known Member

    Very well-said.

    But I'm not going to stop bitching about over-stuffed, drawn-out halftimes.

    That I'll complain about to my grave.
     
    Old Time Hockey and maumann like this.
  7. typefitter

    typefitter Well-Known Member

    World Cups, too.
     
  8. Carlkolchak

    Carlkolchak Member

    Fake news runnin' rampant 'round here.
     
  9. mediaguy

    mediaguy Well-Known Member

    If you want to travel, you have to be willing to travel cheap. That means flying or driving back after an afternoon game. It's today's world. Limited travel budgets.
     
  10. stix

    stix Well-Known Member

    I haven't had to do too much long-distance traveling in my career, as most everything I cover has remained in my home state, but I do get annoyed by travel complaints. It can be an inconvenience, but people travel for jobs in all sorts of industries and have to deal with issues.

    As everyone knows, budgets at papers are extremely tight. Blame who you want, it obviously doesn't matter, but I don't blame the "bean counters" for being tight on travel expenses. Yeah, you need to be provided with the necessities to do your job, but reporters who waste money on travel expenses are really just hurting their own cause and endangering further travel funding for others. I've seen it before, plenty of times. You don't have to eat at McDonald's 5 times in a row while covering a state tournament, of course, but a $35 prime-rib dinner probably isn't necessary. And drink alcohol on your own dime, though I can't imagine any paper anywhere anymore comps reporters for that.

    The other point to this is, and young preps reporters can take this as advice, if you are given the go-ahead to go out of town for a couple days, make it worth the paper's money. If you're at a state tournament for 3 days, three 16-inch gamers that could've been done over the phone will make anyone in upper management furious.

    Blow it out. Produce lots of quality content, because the day is probably coming soon where there's no travel budget at all.
     
  11. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    It's funny, but as I've gotten older I've grown to despise traveling to games.
    Almost all of the colleges that we cover are a 2-3 hour drive each way. When I was younger I used to like going to them. Get out of the office and do something different for a day and it was cool to cover college football (especially SEC football). Getting up early and getting home late was part of the deal.
    Nowadays it's a major pain in the ass.
    College games are a 12-hour investment with that drive. If it's a day game, I have to get up early after only getting a few hours' sleep. If it's a night game I'm not getting back home until midnight or after. Either way, my entire Saturday is shot and then I usually have to work on Sunday on top of it.
    I'm glad I've had the experience of covering college games when I was younger, and that I get to occasionally do them now. They are fun. And I'd love to do an overnight trip once in a while for the adventure of it. But on the whole, I'd rather just have the day off or pull a relaxing desk shift most of the time.
     
  12. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    Back before the business cratered, even our small 10K paper used to send people to things once in a while. Our features writer went to Germany for a week for some big display the state arts museum was doing and wrote one freaking story.
    One.
    For a trip that reportedly cost several thousand dollars.
    I went to Omaha to cover the College World Series around that same time and spent five days in Omaha. I think I wrote 12 stories. Our ME at the time remarked how surprised he was at the output and how I was making everyone else look bad. I thought that's just what you were supposed to do when the paper was spending $2,000 to send you somewhere.
     
    I Should Coco and HanSenSE like this.
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