Sports Journalism & developing critical skills

As a second-year student in Sports Journalism, I took some time to reflect on the lessons I learned and the challenges I faced over the last semesters. Experimentation has been a massive part of the learning process and part of the university experience has been learning the ropes and expanding your skillset to apply to your course and take with me moving forward. The first year was massively important in building connections, applying new skills and methods of working to my projects and helped me to improve skills that can be applied to all walks of life such as teamwork and effective communication as well as organisation.

In my first semester at Solent, I took part in writing lessons and learned about how to develop a style of writing that engages readers and helps to build an audience that will pay attention to your content. It encouraged me to think creatively and look for a better angle when telling a story in order to inspire a better quality piece. Other tasks I was set in the first year included putting together audio and video packages, with the audio being individual and was made up of a self sourced interview, an interview off of IRN and vox pops, which are short interviews with members of the general public. This was rewarding experience as it forced me to come out my shell more and helped improve confidence when engaging with the public and going out to get content to showcase, which I have taken with me into the second year.

It's not been an easy and straight path, with struggling with adapting to uni life and finding certain tasks hard to complete. For example, filming content on a camera and the weather unexpectedly changing, making it an uphill battle to make sure the quality is achieved. Or when the quality of your audio isn’t to the standard you wanted and several retakes for perfection are required, leading to what is sometimes a tedious process. This is all on top of actually adapting to new surroundings and having to integrate yourself into a group of new people.

But it’s all part of the necessary process, as I managed to successfully navigate my way through the first year and faced the step up which was the second year.

This included having to take part in newsdays, which included having to fetch same day news, a podcast and a live program. The skills I learned in the first year were vital in making sure these tasks were completed to the correct standard and also led to an improved efficiency in working on certain tasks, such as writing stories to meet deadlines.

Overall Sports Journalism has pushed me immensely. Its pushed me to apply critical skills to all areas of my course such as written, audio and video work. I’ve become way more confident in my skills and have hopes of achieving a good grade in the subject and take my skills, work on them further to maximise quality of my assignments, and improve with every piece I submit. It has helped me to gain perspective on my situation as a student here, that sometimes suffering and struggling your way through certain things enables you to overcome obstacles down the line and pushes you to continue growing.

By Jack Todd