Is there any way to avoid a preps gig as your first job?

I've considered freelancing HS football as well. That's the only thing I miss from covering preps.

 

I always thought the prep stories were the most real and authentic sports bits in the paper. The larger colleges and pros are so stage managed and careful about what they say.

I've done some traveling the last couple of weeks and the lead front page stories in Seattle and Eugene, Ore., some of the days I was out there were about high school coaching shenanigans.

You can get some good clips and tell some stories with preps but, honestly, you'd be better served by getting on at a decent sized paper and covering cops on the nights and weekends or working in a bureau as a GA. It will set you apart when you want to move to sports, if that's your choice.

If you start in sports, you stay in sports because the perception will be you couldn't handle hard news.

The more well rounded reporters, the people who can cover anything, have literally covered everything. I personally would never hire a sports reporter who hasn't covered news at some point.

 

For a news position? How can they cover news if no one hires them because they started in sports and it's all they've done so far?

 

The move from sports to news can be hard because of news editors' preconceived notions that sports guys can't do "real news." I had no desire to cover sports, but I shotgunned resumes out of college 11 years ago. Not many offers (not a ton of papers in the area I needed to find work, so I admit that was a big handicap), so I took the first: small-town high school sports. Took five years to get back to news. When I was unemployed and looking for work a few years back, again not a lot of options. Guess what? I got another offer for small-town high school sports. I needed any paycheck, so again... with the lack of reporter jobs for any beat these days and pushing 35, I likely won't ever get back to news or move up the sports ladder. Careers are overrated anyway.

 

In my experience, a good sports reporter is much more able to move to news rather than the other way around. It's really not even close.

 

In my experience, it depends on what you value most.

I've found news siders to be much better writers, in the journalism sense. I hated flowery, meaningless prose, and saw much more of it in sports than in news.

It's largely a push on quality and breadth of reporting, though the magnitude of the reporting is completely different.

The standard view is that sports reporters are better on deadline, but I've found plenty of evidence suggesting they're no better or worse at it than the average news sider.

Again, only my experience, but I've found sports reporters and deskers to be much better multitaskers, but that's more the nature of the job than any skill inherently specific to sports journalists.

 

That's ludicrous. Issues found on the hard news side will find its way into sports, especially at the pro level.

Union labor disputes? Check.
Players arrested? Check.
Players on trial? Check.
Contract issues? Check.

 

I wasn't the person who came up with the "toy department" label for sports.

But if you really think that most editors, those who didn't come up in sports, believe that sports writers can't handle hard news coverage, you really are a sports journalist.

To answer an earlier question, if my boss said, as if by magic, that I could hire a sports writer, I wouldn't hire one who hasn't covered at least some news.

I just think it is funny that, by some on the posts here, that reporters should know how to blog, and tweet and shoot video and take their own pictures but don't think that spending time on other desks would be a good thing for their careers.

 

Lost in this is that some sports people don't want to handle hard news coverage. It sucked out my soul more than a few times.

To address the original question, I hated covering preps as much as anyone. But I also never aspired to move up within a sports department - it was pretty obvious early on that I fit much better on the news side, and that's where I spent most of my career.

I don't see any way around covering preps if your end goal is covering a college or pro beat. Take what you can get when you can get it and hope against hope that it leads you where you want to go.

 

The reason that most editors think that sports writers wouldn't be able to handle hard news is very simple: Most sports writers wouldn't be able to handle hard news.

I flirted with moving to news side at one point. Had about 10 years under my belt at that point. I considered myself fairly accomplished. The politics beat opened at the paper and I inquired about it. The news editor tried to talk me into education or night cops. I got the hint.

 

How do you know they can't handle it if you never give them the chance?