By. Nick Konotopskyj
Assistant Sports Editor
College journalists dream about covering professional sports and talking to professional athletes.
Tuesday morning at the Dresser Auditorium, professional writers and young, inspired college students met at the annual Dick Joyce Sports Symposium workshop on how college media should cover sports on campus.
The symposium was led by a panel of distinguished journalists both St. Bonaventure and across the country.
Joe Pinter, a senior journalism and mass communication major at St. Bonaventure, at about the difference between covering college sports and professional sports.
“It is definitely different than covering (sports) for a news organization or for a professional team,” Pinter said. “It gets different when some of the people you go to for sources are higher up through administrators that you have to answer to. It is definitely a weird dynamic that goes on.”
Although it was a small crowd in attendance, the panel discussed a wide range of topics from covering controversial topics to learning from peers on how to become better journalists.
Jennifer Surane is a senior business journalism major at the University of North Carolina who was a panelist at Tuesday’s symposium. She is the Editor-In-Chief for the Daily Tar Heel, the campus newspaper.
Surane talked about the importance of building relationships with the people interviewees and covering not just the live games/matches of each team, but more ground-breaking stories.
“I really worry that a lot of sports reporters are only covering games,” Surane said. “Don’t be afraid to request public records. There’s a lot of different things you can request even as a private school to get a little more juicy stories out there to your student body.”
The panel also talked about different scandals that have taken place in collegiate sports recently like in North Carolina, Duke and even the St. Bonaventure basketball scandal that rocked the university in 2003.
With stories like that, it is important to get the stories right the first time. The speakers mentioned that college writers are held to the same standards as professionals.
Regarding St. Bonaventure, Pinter believes that there are a few ways that the school can improve its coverage of sports on campus.
“I feel like we should have more coverage across the board and then not as many game stories but more feature stories where you find a more interesting angle to the story instead of just covering a game,” Pinter said.
However, the challenge with this is developing a close relationship with the people you interview in only a short amount of time, according to Surane.
“As a student journalist, the most time you have is four years, but in general, you are only in your position for one,” Surane said. “How do you build and foster that relationship in one year? It just seems really impossible.”
Building close relationships in a short amount of time is difficult, but in the end, it helps the reporter get better quotations and also makes the quality of the story that much better.
