The Great Debate: Should national media get better access than local media?

 When you work for a student publication, you learn pretty quickly (especially in sports), that’s there’s a bit of a hierarchy when it comes to the media that covers the team.

As far as the regulars who cover the team, The Daily Athenaeum has been able to work its way up to where we are now a publication that is being treated just as well and gets just as much access with the teams we cover as every other publication that covers WVU sports. We’ve been able to continue gaining that respect over the last few year by providing the fair and unbiased coverage of these teams just like everyone else whose job it is to write and report on the Mountaineers.

This spring, we’ve gotten to learn firsthand about the hierarchy that also exists on the larger scale of national media vs. local media.

With the West Virginia football team looking like it has the ability to be one of the best teams in the nation, it has brought plenty of attention to Morgantown from national media outlets like ESPN, CBS Sports and Sports Illustrated.

And they’ve been treated a little differently than us local guys have.

Following WVU’s football practice Tuesday (in which ESPN’s Joe Schad, Jesse Palmer, Chris Spielman and Joey Galloway, along with CBS Sports’ Bruce Feldman were in attendance for) , WVIllustrated.com’s Geoff Coyle wrote this about what local beat writers have been experiencing this spring.

“We’ve been told the difference is that those folks are “invited guests,” yet their job is the same, to report on what they saw at practice. The rest of us, the uninvited guests as it seems, see so little that blog updates like this one get progressively thinner as the spring wears on,” Coyle wrote.

The way it is currently set up is that the media comes into practice (usually at 4:30 p.m., unless we’re told any differently) and we get to watch the first 30 minutes. Usually that entails getting to watch the team stretch and break off into drills. Most of the time they work on something involving kickoff or punt coverages, Oklahoma drills and position coaches work with their players on individual things.

But we see no actual football being played all spring.

The day of the first scrimmage, after 20 minutes they began playing and we had to leave. To be clear, I personally have no problem with the fact that we don’t get to watch anything. I understand that head coach Dana Holgorsen doesn’t want people to write about the things his team does in actual situations that they’re going to have in games.

With that said, it does seem a little unfair that they’ve gotten so much more access.

But I see where they’re coming from and why they do it. Honestly, I don’t blame them.

Letting The Daily Athenaeum stay for the whole practice and writing about what they see isn’t going to get nearly as many views as letting ESPN, CBS or Sports Illustrated do that. As a football program, WVU is trying to do whatever it can do to get as much buzz as possible coming into this season (and for good reason).

With these guys there getting the coverage they’ve gotten, it’s brought about a lot of really positive things about the program, the players and the coaching staff.

“It’s in the best interest of the program to let national media get a full view when they come, so they can shed a favorable light on WVU. That being said, there is no negative side effects of having local media get the same view,” one WVU beat writer said. “Trying to report from 30 minutes of practice is laughable.” 

It’s a unique situation where you can see both sides and understand why local media is mad about this, but also see why WVU is doing it.

It might be a little unfair to the local beat writers like us at The DA, but I guess that’s why everyone in this industry strives to get the chance to work at one of those big national publications. Who wouldn’t want to be treated like they’ve been by WVU at every single school they travel to?

Must be nice …

Move to PR ‘perfect’ for former Sports Editor

Tony Dobies still remembers the first story he ever wrote at The Daily Athenaeum.

“It was the first semester of my sophomore year. It was a terrible column about the ESPN BottomLine that I regret to this day,” he said. “It was like, ‘You know it’s football season because the BottomLine is filled with things about college football,’ or something awful like that.”

During the next five years that he would go on to write for The DA, he improved quite a bit from that first column and the first interview he conducted with former WVU running back Ed Collington (he admitted to sitting in his car for two hours writing down questions “because I didn’t know what I was doing”).

He went on to win multiple West Virginia Press Association and Society of Professional Journalists awards, and got the opportunity to cover West Virginia’s Fiesta Bowl victory over Oklahoma and the Mountaineers’ Big East championship and Final Four runs in the 2009-10 basketball season.

That growth he experienced in that time with a student newspaper showed him just how important it is to take advantage of the fact that you can work in a newspaper while you’re in school because it gives you the chance to learn first-hand what it takes to be successful in the industry that you want to work in when you’re done.

In sports, you’re working every day with other reporters who have been doing this for a lot longer than you have, and you get a unique chance to absorb information early on until you get to the point where you’re comfortable in what you’re doing and can continue to do a good job.

“This is really broad, but I learned how to report and interview people because that was really the hardest thing starting out,” he said. “After you get used to it, you realize that it’s not just running down a list of questions. You actually have to talk and carry on a conversation with these people.

“(At the beginning), I was just able to kind of chill and look at the people who have done it for a long time and just say, ‘OK, well I’ll try to mimic them the next time,’ and then I used those things I picked up in my other beats.”

After spending half a decade at The DA, Dobies finally moved on into the real world this year. But he’s not spending all of his time as a sports writer anymore.

He currently works with West Virginia University as a Communications Specialist, and his day primarily consist of writing press releases about things that are going on around WVU.

“Even if I would’ve gotten a job covering WVU football or basketball, it still wasn’t going to be like it was at The DA where I could control everything,” Dobies said. “(At The DA) I could pick what I wanted to write, give the crappy stories to everybody else (WRITER’S NOTE: like me) and could cover what I wanted to, go on these trips and hang out with the people that I like.”

He is still getting to write sports on the side, which is what he described as his “perfect situation” when he began looking for a job after he graduated. On top of his Communications job with WVU, he also works as a writer with BlueGoldNews.com, where he gets to cover the Mountaineer football and men’s basketball teams.

Although the two jobs are a little different — he has to be a bit more positive on the PR side than he usually is when he covering sports — he’s still able to use the experience that he picked up with sports writing to help him.

“I was lucky that the position that I got opened up when it did,” Dobies said. “In terms of writing, it’s not that different. I do more features. We’re “telling the University’s stories” more than anything.”

— Michael

A month to remember

There are a lot of perks to being a student sports writer.

For those who want to continue as journalists when we get out of school, the chance to get to work in a professional setting while we’re still students is something you don’t get to do in other professions.

You get to see what it’s like covering a beat and reporting on a team every day and, as part of those responsibilities, you get to go on trips to cover your team.

Some of those trips don’t mean much outside of the added experience of getting to cover a game in a different venue. I mean, by the time I got back to Morgantown I already wanted to forget that I had just made a trip to Piscataway, N.J. when West Virginia played there against Rutgers in football.

Then there are others, like I had with the Orange Bowl and Big East Conference tournament, which you’ll remember forever. As a student reporter, you get to be at a big venue watching games that everyone is watching with national media members from organizations like ESPN or CBS Sports in the same workroom as you.

It’s a little surreal, I must admit.

But no experience I’ve had in my two years as a college journalist compares to what Adam Stern got to live through last March.

Stern, who is now the Executive Editor at Virginia Commonwealth University’s student newspaper The Commonwealth Times, served as The CT’s Sports Editor a year ago and covered the VCU basketball team.

At the beginning of the month, the Rams were a bubble team and their future of making to the NCAA tournament was in doubt.

They ended up earning a berth in the tournament’s “First Four” as one of the No. 11 seeds. That’s when VCU and head coach Shaka Smart went on a run to the Final Four that college basketball fans across the country will never forget.

And Adam got to be there every step of the way covering it.

“Covering that run last year was nuts. It was certainly the most unique, awesome, unbelievable exhilarating experience of my life,” Stern said. “To go from not even being sure that the squad was going to make the tournament to making the Final Four and obviously capturing the country’s attention in the process was something I’ll never forget.

“I’m definitely thankful that I got to be a part of something like that.”

For the senior journalism major from northern Virginia, it was a chance to get to be a part of something bigger than he had gotten to experience in his short time as a student journalist. He got the opportunity to be on the biggest stage you could be on as a sports writer, and got the chance to be around some of the best in the business and travel all across the country on the road to the Final Four.

The first game was in Dayton, then a few days later they were in Chicago for two games before spending the final two weeks of the tournament in San Antonio and Houston.

“In terms of the strictly journalism side, it was a great learning experience in the amount of travel we went through, all the interviews through press conferences and locker-room access and stories we got to write,” Stern said. “We also got to be around some of the top journalists in the game, which was great to meet some of them. Yahoo!’s Pat Forde bought us a round of beers in San Antonio; that was a pretty cool moment.”

Stern got a taste of the life he wants to live when he gets out of school during that month.

And since then he’s been working at continuing to improve so that he can one day make that dream a reality.

“Getting to live the life the pros live with the traveling certainly whet my appetite for more,” he said. “Just knowing I’ll be able to put this on my resume doesn’t hurt either.

“I was hungry to succeed in the journalism world before VCU’s Final Four run – the run just gave me a great and valuable experience and for that I’m definitely grateful as well as hungry for more.”

During his time as a student media member working for The CT, Stern has gotten a good grasp of what it’s going to take to succeed once he leaves school and is out looking for a job. That knowledge that he’s gained is simple …

“There’s still a lot of desire in the public for good sports journalism – it just has to be done different than ways in the past,” he said. “You have to give the people something extra – the writing has to have more of a cutting edge today – as opposed to just merely relaying what happened like sports journalism in yesteryear.”

Follow Adam and the rest of The Commonwealth Times’ sports staff on Twitter, they do great work and are currently in Portland covering VCU’s game against Indiana Saturday in the third round of the NCAA tournament.

— Michael