Exactly How Fun Is It To Be a Sports Journalist?

The boss you became close friends with? What happened?

 

And when you were provided with some (airline pilots, air traffic controllers, tech support personnel), you moved the goalposts and complained that those jobs entailed high stress and were hard on "family life."

 

It'd carry the same weight as the decision to choose any other career path.

 

Well, you're in high school. It's not a decision you have to make for a long time. You've got some more HS all of college ahead of you. Plenty of time for any and everything to happen to you. Some great sports writers don't find their way to the field until well after college.

 

No I am still in high school. Although I am an editor at Fanside, but get nowhere close to full time job. Im thinking Sports Management. I just want to do a career in sports , sounds kid-like, I know.

 

It's all of a piece, quality of life. That's the bottom line. If you think working at night works for your quality of life, then I'm happy for you. I'm just commenting from my own experience and situation. As someone who has a family, I don't want a high-stress job that has night shifts, middling pay and shitty job security. If I had no kids, I guess working as an airline pilot would be great. But as someone who does have kids, I'm more interested in them than flying around the world or writing about other people's kids playing children's games, which is all sports is.

 

That's another problem I have, classifying what sports journalists do as meaningless. And when you do, it comes off, again, an attempt to justify the career change.

Sports is a major aspect of the world's culture. And our profession has become about more than fun and games. At least, it is if you do it right.

The "toy department" doesn't rank as some sort of sub-species to the newsroom as a whole.

 

I hardly think sports are meaningless. As you said, they are a huge part of our culture -- as are bubble gum pop music, fashion and televisions shows focusing on teenagers.

For me, once I got to an age where all the athletes I was covering were younger than me, I just starting mentally checking out. I no more want to interview a 15-year-old about baseball than I want to interview a 15-year-old about their music or fashion influences.

 

CD, this is where you got people taking exception to your remarks. You sounded like you believed that anybody who works nights, weekends and holidays doesn't give a shit about friends, family and people in general.

True, if you work those shifts, you have to adjust the time you are around family and friends. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to spend time with them.

As far as how it applies to the newspaper business and sports writing, I think the issue there is this: Those in the business are expected to do more with less, making it harder for them to take an evening or weekend off, or making it more difficult to get a holiday off once in a while, even if those evenings, weekends and holidays come during a time when work is slower.

I don't know everything about airline pilots, but I would suspect a lot of pilots do have family and friends and are able to find ways to spend time with them, even if it's not as often as the person who works a 9-5, M-F job. The question to ask is, are the airlines running their business so that pilots are able to have an evening, weekend or holiday off once in a while?

And along with that, what other working conditions are like. After all, somebody who prefers to work a 9-5, M-F job is not going to put up with a bad boss, low pay, "do more with less" philosophy, etc., any more than the person who works nights, weekends and holidays.

 

Granted, most of us aren't out trying to save the world -- we're too busy trying to save ourselves if we work for a newspaper -- but I certainly wouldn't classify what we do as "meaningless."

When I visit the local breakfast hot spots, the conversational buzz is much more likely to be about LeBron James or Derek Jeter than the previous night's county commission meeting (even though those meetings are often very "entertaining" in this corrupt corner of the world). So I think there's value in doing what we do and delivering sports news, even if the traditional delivery method (print) is fading away.

Twenty years ago, when my newspaper was fighting tooth-and-nail for circulation with another nearby major metro, people would tell me they chose our paper because of our sports section. So our sports coverage was meaningful to more than a few consumers back then (not to mention our company's employees and shareholders). If you look at the growth of sports media in general, that's still the case.

 

Yeah, I was going to say sports plays a major part in paying the bills ... except, apparently the bills don't always get paid anymore.

 

The world is falling apart. Sport is virtually meaningless at this point. It's at best a distraction from the terrible shit that is going on.