I have a friend who graduated about a year-and-a-half ago who decided he really wanted to be a sports reporter. He is now in his third job. Seems he didn’t like a lot of the possibilities right out of school.
He worked for a small company similar to Vype that went from coverage in 50 states to coverage in five in a week’s time. Then he moved on to the Newton Kansan. Now he’s moved on to his third writing gig, technically a general assignment reporter, but covers more sports than anything.
He has had to move back home to save money (a lot of people have been with today’s economy) and now works for and lives in the same town he grew up in.
Not quite what he had hoped for when he read Sports Illustrated, I’m sure.
He works at a weekly and has time to get some quality content in and more time to cover sports, but it made me think about the speakers we’ve heard in the past few weeks.
Would it really be worth it to step out of college and work for a small-town paper writing high school sports to try to get a foot up into better sports (not for me…but we all know that)? What happens if you just get…stuck there?
With all these speakers we’ve heard from in class, I think it’s important to remember one thing. Though they may be at KAKE now (or even the New York Times), most of them started out at a Podunk paper making minimal money. The economy was much different for most of them, I’d imagine.
Now salaries are lower, the job market is tighter and costs are skyrocketing.
Is it really worth it to write about sports because it’s what you want to do? Even if it means struggling to pay the bills? What do you guys think?
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