The group of ASNE Reynolds High School journalism institute participants heard from Tom Blodgett, the assistant sports editor at The Arizona Republic, today on the topic of sports writing for high school papers. The most interesting comments were about how to write when your high school teams are not successful. This applies to my staff and my school. My students focus more on the athletes than the scores and records. There will always be at least one interesting person, even on a losing team. At my school we have foreign exchange students, we have students with disabilities and we have many students with interesting background stories. These can all be told without focusing on who dropped the winning touchdown in a football game or who went 0-4 at the plate in another baseball loss.
The 35 members of the institute can be invaluable resources to talk to each other about story ideas when it appears that there is none.
Jeff Fencl
Del Norte High School
Albuquerque, N.M.
Posts
The Washington Post did a story on one of our amazingly talented athletes who immigrated from Africa. The angle on the story was that his folks did not value his athletic ability and never attended his games. On purpose. They did not value that at all. They were religious, valued his studies, couldn't care less about the sports thinking it was frivolous. Different angle.
ReplyDeleteJoanna Greer
John F. Kennedy High School
Silver Spring, Md