Coming into this course I felt that I had a strong sense of what it took be a sports reporter/journalist. I had covered sports for one of the university’s newspapers and I covered Long Island high school sports for a local magazine for several years.
However, after reading Gary Smith all semester and listening to the guest speakers describe their careers I realized how weak my grasp of this profession really was.
My favorite element of the course was the Gary Smith readings. Every story that we were assigned to read didn’t feel like an assignment. We were given a lesson on how good a story can be if enough reporting is done accurately. Besides being a skilled writer, Smith was an even better reporter and showed in every story we covered.
Additionally, I was a huge fan of the guest speakers. From meeting our school’s AD for the first time to meeting Grant Hill’s mother, each one of them provided his or her known tale about the various subcategories of sports journalism. These were especially effective because instead of having you stand in front of the class and tell us about these subcategories, you brought in members of the profession to show us them.
The greatest thing that I learned from this class is that it is essential to do reporting on top of reporting in order to produce a worthwhile story. I always knew that I was supposed to make conversation with my sources rather than bombard them questions. I always knew that I was supposed to show m story the readers rather than tell it to them. I always knew that I was supposed to become as qualified, if not more qualified, than my sources so I could write my story rather than tell it through a plethora of quotes. But, i9n this course I was able to put these bits of knowledge into practice.
This course and the style of writing that it required of the students was, in my opinion, different from any of the other journalism courses that I have taken thus fat at Stony Brook. We were driven towards writing feature stories rather than news stories which was a nice change of pace from the other courses of this major.
I thought that the organization of the course was a bit shaky, however that is to be expected with a first time teacher. I thought things ran much smoother during the second half of the term. Overall, you kept us in line by filling our inboxes with updates (annoying at times but effective to keep us on the same page) and you pushed us to produce work of the quality that you’d expect from your colleagues at ESPN. You treated us as colleagues instead of as students and I felt that I was able to focus more on improving my skills as a journalist rather than on my grades because of it.
