MASTERCLASSES

Friday 20 May 2011

How to become a sports journalist: previewing Masterclass 28 of MMJ

Sport. Great
Who doesn’t think they would be good at lying on a sofa, sipping a beer and sounding off about their favourite game?
But that's not quite the full range of talents you need.
Maybe commentating on matches takes your fancy?
That’s one very visible aspect of sport, but it’s not what most sports journalists do most of the time.
There are many more types of sport report.
As well as live match reports (and there are plenty of those thanks to text-based ball-by-ball commentary on mobile phones) there are  previews or scene setters before a game and inquest pieces after it
One major growth area is in sports news reporting. Sport is big business, as well as an obsession for many, and it can attract readers to newspapers and eyeballs to websites and broadcast news coverage.
If we take football, the finances of the clubs, the transfer fees for star players, the intrigues concerning the sport’s governing bodies, all require a solid knowledge of a sport if they are to be reported effectively.
These brands of sports reporting all require skills quite apart from those of knowing a sport and how to analyse a game or match.
Some are the skills of a general reporter, but awareness of, for example, business reporting, quickly become important.
So, here’s what we’ll look at in Masterclass 28:

  • How to get into it sports journalism – should you specialise early on or get general news reporting experience first?
  • What you’ll need to know about what sports
  • Examples of how to report throughout the sports news cycle
  • The skills of the commentator
  • How to make stories about a particular sport of interest to a general audience
  • How to learn from the very best sports writers and broadcasters around
  • University courses in sports journalism
The link below will take you to the first of seven modules, which will be available for a few days for non-subscribers to MMJ, and for good if you have bought the textbook Multimedia Journalism, A Practical Guide and activated your account usign the access key you'll fidn in the paper textbook, or in the Kindle edition

 Next: How to become a sports journalist

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