PBS MediaShift on getting sportswriters out of their comfort zone

As a followup to yesterday’s B/R Blog post about how journalists should prepare for the future—by acquiring deep knowledge—here’s a piece on PBS MediaShift headlined “How to Teach Sports Journalists to Get Out of Their Comfort Zone.”

Writer Molly Yanity, a longtime sportswriter who now teaches at Quinnipiac University, is talking to other journalism teachers, but as I wrote yesterday, anyone with an eye to having a future in media, which means a career of adapting, can benefit from the advice.

Let’s start by not letting a sports team be a beat for class and suggest the student cover an issue related to the entire department instead. Maybe it is gender issues and athletics. Or, perhaps it is law, university policy and the athletics program.

This forces students out of the routine and into a completely different mindset. The student must identify complex story ideas, conduct difficult interviews, analyze public documents, consider different forms of media for presentation and still search for feel-good stories not found in press releases.

It also guides students to think unilaterally about a topic that sustains their attention for a long period of time.

It forces them to care.

Imagine if a major news outlet assigned a reporter to the NFL & off-field issues beat. The stories would be diverse, informative, ahead of the breaking news curve and serve a real purpose in society outside of fantasy football.

Yanity also suggests that writer be aware of historical context, and that they find ways to care. That is, work on stories that actually mean something. She cites Kate Fagan’s Brittney Griner profile for ESPN, “Owning the Middle,” as an example.