What other fields do our skills translate to?

You never realize how well you were trained, grammar- and spelling-wise, until you take a job outside journalism. Especially when dealing with younger people.

 

Or in front of the body.

Tried a Tour de France cutout once.

Once.

 

This one cut close to home. Too close.

"Well, (insert fellow sports reporter's name), the racket's gonna have blue between the strings! Because I just spent two hours cutting out each strand of her damn hair and, yes, it looks like shit but I'm done with this cutout! OPEN APPLE D MF'er! I'm done!"

 

As wicked said, older stories often show up earlier. I just entered a search for "Tim Tebow baseball" and three stories, none "younger" than 19 hours old, showed up in the top window. The only recent links on the first page of results were stories from four days ago about his outfield mishap. One connected his injury to the one suffered by Mickey Mantle during the 1951 World Series. That's a sly way to get more hits. A less subtle way is to combine popular SEO terms. Two of the links are titled "When will Tim Tebow play in the majors?" (ESPN.com) and "Is Russell Wilson better at baseball than Tim Tebow?" (MLB.com).

Some sites also suffer b/c they cram the SEO terms in there. Google knows when you're trying to game the system and any links that load up the SEO terms are automatically listed lower in the search. I was told to spread out the primary SEO term five times in a 300-to-500 word piece of web copy and the secondary SEO terms between once and three times apiece.

 

Or teachers ... or PR people who have zero newspaper experience.

It's amazing how many simple grammatical mistakes my fellow educators make.

 

My last year of college, we asked a professor in the communications department to pen a guest op-ed (can't remember what it was about) for the school paper. One of our EICs, upon editing it, said he'd become a communications professor without ever learning how to write.

 

Don't underestimate the average sportswriter's penchant for research and data analysis. There's nothing hotter in marketing (and particularly B2B marketing) at the moment. If you can extract the meaning from a large dataset, competently use Excel and a BI platform like Google Data Studio or Tableau, and write up your conclusions in a cogent way, you're going to pique some interest.

For practice, I usually grab a CSV dataset from Baseball Reference, clean it up in Google Sheets and play with different visualizations in Google Data Studio (which is free and awesome). To wit – and it's a silly little example – Hank Aaron tended to hit more home runs away than at home in the first half of his career, and the opposite in the second half. Why? Well, here are the park factors for his home parks: 2018-03-09_09-58-28.png

 

I landed at a big box distribution center (i.e. warehouse) less than a month after a small daily paper fired me.

I was hired during the peak season (Black Friday through early January gift card spending) and started like most other new hires in the picking and packing departments.

After I lasted through the peak surge, I was one of the few kept because of my attention to detail. A few weeks later, one of my leaders reviewed my resume and moved me to a function in which sending out emails and reviewing data was important.

Fast forward and I am now the receiving clerk and send out emails and review numbers on a daily basis.

I still freelance on the side, but I like my new job and my background as a journalist has helped me understand data in ways coworkers with far more warehouse experience just do not.

 

Without seeking specific numbers, how does your salary compare?

 

1. Give up on sports journalism. That would be my strong suggestion.
2. Consider PR.
3. Learn every online/design/web/HTML skill you can.
4. Be on the lookout for government positions that aren't always posted on job sites. I got my first job outside journalism that way, through a job ad that was posted for one week in early July.

 

Where was that government job posted?