Miles Jordan
Biggest challenges for sports journalists
Miles Jordan and Matthew Gervasio discuss about future careers
April 23, 2024
By: Miles Jordan and Matthew Gervasio
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As sports media and analytics majors at Virginia Tech, Miles Jordan and Matthew Gervasio have had the opportunity to explore different career fields that best suit their differences, such as sports photography, data analytics, and journalism, through various courses they have taken at Virginia Tech.
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The goal of the sports media analytics major is to give students real-world experience in meeting deadlines, conducting research, finding sources, getting quotes, taking quality pictures, and combining all of the information found into a news story with photos, audio, text, and sometimes infographics. This experience is supposed to prepare students who want to enter journalism or reporting in a professional field. However, there are still many challenges that sports journalists and reporters face that take more work to replicate at Virginia Tech.
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College Gameday cast, a group of sports journalists who travel around the country to report on the week's most highly anticipated college football game. Screenshot: ESPN.com
Jordan and Gervasio shed light on the unpredictable nature of a sports journalist's job, where the demand for travel during in-season and sometimes off-season activities and the absence of a fixed schedule are the norm. They illustrate this with an example of how, during the season, journalists are constantly on the move and must be ready to drop everything if news breaks, putting their job first. While at Virginia Tech, students have deadlines they must hit that are set days, weeks, and sometimes even months in advance; in the real world, if a story drops, the deadline to cover that story is as soon as possible, and unlike in school, there is no possibility of an extension on a deadline.