Keep Cracking On | Young Sports Journalist
‘Keep Cracking On’.
Today, the opportunities seem limitless but as my friend, the Israeli football writer Shaul Adar lamented the other day: “Sports journalism used to be a great career, now it’s a great hobby.
Let’s deal with the bad news first. When asked for advice by aspiring journalists, my first question is: “Are you sure?” As James Dolan, executive chairman of Madison Square Garden Sports, put it last year: “The mechanisms for the monetisation of content are in disarray.” As indeed are the mechanisms for remunerating sports journalists at present. Hopefully, that disarray will be rectified in the not-too-distant future.
Sports journalism is still a fascinating career. Your peers will be much more entertaining to work with – and/or compete against – than, say, bank clerks or insurance managers). Nor will you suffer from what we might call ‘Chandler Bing syndrome’ in which he tells his fellow Friends: “Right kids, I’ve got to get to work. If I don’t input those numbers … it won’t make much of a difference.” The fruits of your labours – whatever kind of article you write – are immediate and tangible even if they can sometimes be unpleasant, because many leaders in sport are as hypersensitive to real or imagined slights as Vladimir Putin. You just need to be realistic about your priorities. With that caveat in mind, here is some advice gleaned from decades on the coalface.
Define what makes you distinct.
The first thing you need to consider is what your compelling competitive advantage will be. If you’re very lucky, that will be your tone, attitude and style as it has been for Rory Smith, Jonathan Wilson, Martin Samuels (love him or loathe him, he’s seldom dull), Sid Lowe, Gideon Haigh, and Gerry Thornley, rugby correspondent for the Irish Times. Or you can find – and all but trademark – your own niche, informed by specialist knowledge and expertise. (If you haven’t got any, consider what aspect of sport you’re most passionate about, and develop some.) To cite just one example, Jon Mackenzie has flourished by explaining how football matches are influenced by what teams do without the ball.
Build your profile.
Sometimes the best advice is the most obvious. Even in an age when digital technology is redesigning the media business, one in four of the aspiring journalists I talk to don’t have a blog, website or significant presence on social media. As editors are now so inundated with CVs they actively search for excuses to reject them, they will consider your absence as damning proof that you lack ambition, intelligence or passion. (Or all three.)
Get inside the circle.
The best way to build your profile is in person. There are legitimate concerns about publishers’ use – and abuse – of internships but my last work experience candidates all found jobs in journalism. (I hired one of them myself.) The day-to-day reality of these schemes varies – some publishers will mainly want you to organise coffee, others will ask you to write stories – but, even in a worst-case scenario, the activity will look good on your CV. You might also earn some freelance work or a decent reference.
Learn from the good, the bad and the ugly.
One great virtue of journalism – and sports journalism – is that, unlike many other industries, the best and worst practice is freely, or cheaply, available. The bad stuff – sometimes more illuminating – is only a quick google away. Avoiding the usual cliches will help your copy seem fresher and, importantly, help you use fewer words. For example, a crucial boundary from the last ball of a cricket match doesn’t ‘prove to be the winning run’, it is the winning run. In his book Football Cliches, Adam Hurley captures the jargon noting, among other things, that the collective noun for yellow cards is ‘flurry’.
As for the good stuff, the seminal texts I’d recommend include the Faber Book of Tennis (worth it just for Martin Amis’s essay on the game’s ‘personalities’ or, as he refers to them ‘assholes’), Mike Brearley’s The Art of Captaincy, Eamon Murphy’s Only a Game (his candid diary of a season at Millwall in the early 1970s), or anything by John Arlott, Brian Glanville, Gabriele Marcotti, Mike Atherton, and Michael Parkinson.) The annual anthologies of the best (largely American) sports writing are worth checking out. I treasure Hunter S. Thompson’s essay The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved which, although the format and style are out of fashion, remains an exhilarating, instructive read. And remember, that you can learn from any journalist – inspirational or insipid – writing on any topic. One writer I benchmark my final drafts against is John Lanchester, a novelist and financial journalist who has a rare knack of making the complex feel simple. His 2021 essay on cheating in sport for the London Review of Books are 4,222 of the most entertaining words I’ve ever read.
Have an angle.
As F. Scott Fitzgerald observed: “The cleverly expressed opposite of any generally accepted idea is worth a fortune to somebody.” If you’re trying to catch an editor’s eye when you start out you won’t get much traction by pointing out that the present Welsh rugby team is abysmal, the Premier League title is Liverpool’s to lose or darts is cool again. It makes more sense to challenge the assumptions, biases and shibboleths which sport – and the sports media – is marinated in. Simon Kuper, who came to fame with the book Football Against the Enemy, gives a master class in unconventional wisdom in the Financial Times Weekend magazine.
Understand your story.
One of the most catastrophic, time-consuming errors you can make is to start your story in the wrong place. It’s easy to be distracted by the quest for that perfect first line. If you’re really struggling, stick a placeholder there, move onto the second paragraph and come back to the beginning later. Even something as commonplace as a match report can be approached as a straight news story, opinion piece or mini-feature. The latter style is increasingly common as sportswriters dwell on a particular angle – an athlete’s form, the coach’s future, or a contentious incident – to give fans something different. That said, there is a balance to be struck. Barney Ronay’s football reports for The Guardian are invariably entertaining but describing Virgil van Dijk as “striding about the place like the 17th Earl of Egham with a quiver of pheasants over one shoulder” is an elevated form of showing off, worthy of Quentin Tarantino. It might entertain readers – but also distracts them. (Spoiler alert! Egham has never had an Earl.) Full disclosure: I am a great admirer of most of Ronay’s work, especially his book The Manager: The Absurd Ascent of the Most Important Man in Football.
Don’t forget the virtual elephant in the room.
How do you manage Search Engine Optimisation? At a time when publishers (especially national newspaper group Reach) increasingly measure journalists on clicks per story, SEO is impossible to ignore. Every journalist handles this issue in their own way. I prefer to finish a first draft before exploring how best to optimise it. The trouble with this utilitarian benchmarking of stories – and journalists – is that an anodyne article about Real Madrid will invariably attract more clicks than an insightful piece about how fan ownership is working out for Wycombe Wanderers.
Sweat the small stuff.
Anything you write will be improved if you stick it in a metaphorical or physical drawer for a while and trim it by 10% – or more. Think of that scene in the movie Spotlight where the Boston Globe’s editor, poring over the draft report on clerical abuse, strikes out words with the simple explanation: “Adjective.” Other random tips that spring to mind include: never start an article with the definite article; don’t start too many consecutive sentences with ‘It’ or ‘The’ (even if you alternate them); wear your research lightly and don’t get high on your own style. Oh, and short sentences can be useful. Very much so in fact.
And don’t stop buggering on.
Sports journalism is not, alas, a perfect meritocracy but with talent, persistence and a bit of luck – a much-underrated factor in sport – you can succeed.
Paul Simpson
The author was the launch editor of FourFourTwo magazine, has written about football for the Financial Times, The Blizzard and Slate, edited Champions magazine and various programmes for UEFA, co-wrote Who Invented the Stepover? with Uli Hesse, and covered cycling, darts and athletics for Pitch magazine.
he Young Sports Journalist competition is open now. Details at: https://www.pitch-mag.co.uk/young-sports-journalist-competition