Journalism Experience

Let me cast aside any doubt and say I love to write about sports - baseball, in particular.

Begin a writer for a newspaper always sounded interesting to me, so I went to school for journalism at Ohio University. It has a fine journalism school and I focused on news writing and editing for about a quarter. Then I gave broadcast a shot and I decided to stick with it.

There is tremendous opportunity at OU because the campus is in Southeast Ohio, which often finds itself as an underserved area in a no man's land between two television markets. For students, it is a chance to do work that matters and the University hosts a public television station, WOUB. I had the opportunity to work in radio and television for nearly four years.

Everyone wants to be in TV right when they walk through the door, but they soon find they must work their way up through radio. After I finished training, I got my first gig on the air - at around 6:30am. That meant getting to the station by 5am. I mispronounced Gallipolis. Soon I began to cover stories for our live news program and before I knew it I was a sports and news anchor. Yes, I even covered a story on some cows that escaped from a truck. My best experience was going up to Jacobs Field (now Progressive Field) to interview Nick Swisher and Jay Payton. Each player was with the Athletics and were born in my viewing area. For those of you who don't know, Swisher is a funny guy.

I also co-hosted an hour-long sports talk show with my good friend Andrew Braverman. Braves and I built the rundown, booked guests and talked about sports both locally and nationally. We usually had plenty to rant about, as Andrew was a life-long Cubs and Bears fan, while I was a life-long Reds and Browns fan. On the local level, the Ohio Bobcats basketball team gave us plenty of thrillers, none more so than the time Leon Williams tipped this one in. Yes, the O-Zone did storm the court.

The experience that every sports broadcast student enjoys most is Gridiron Glory, a live program that covers high school football on Friday nights. How many college kids would give up Friday nights to do something like this? More than you would think, because we had up to 50 people working on it. I was a reporter for three years, then a producer for my last year. We were recognized with a Regional Emmy Award for Outstanding Students Production in my final year after submitting a show that went live from three different locations. In my four years, I built rundowns, wrote stories, shot video, edited highlights and reported on air.

While I have not had a full-time career in journalism since then, I now write for a fantasy sports website, Rotowire. I edit player profiles to keep them updated with news and write a weekly column for the website. More on all that in a later post.