By
eHow Careers & Work Editor
Difficulty: Moderately challenging
Things You’ll Need:
Step1
Take as many writing courses as possible in high school and college because strong English skills are essential. Work on your high school and college newspaper, too.
Step2
Keep in mind that, as in other branches of journalism, every subject will come in handy: history, political science, biology, etc. Major in journalism in college only if the journalism department gives you time to take lots of outside courses; if you can, make it a liberal-arts major with a journalism minor.
Step3
Learn to type. Very few sportswriters learn shorthand, which is a mistake; they miss a lot in interviews, and tape-recording and then transcribing is too slow.
Step4
Learn about sports: what constitutes a 300 game in bowling, how to do a box score in baseball, what three events make up the Triple Crown in horse racing. Watch and read about as many contests as possible.
Step5
Remember that apart from school newspapers, a great place to start is to cover high school sports for a local paper. Most papers are anxious to find people willing to stalk the sidelines of Friday-night high school football games; it might result in only a three-paragraph story, but it's a foot in the door.
Step6
Keep up to date by reading "Editor & Publisher" magazine; its classified-ad section almost always lists openings in sports departments around the country. Subscribe to the Columbia Journalism Review as well.
Step7
Become a better sportswriter by reading good writers - and not just in the newspaper sports sections and sports magazines. Most of the best sportswriters read widely: mainstream novels, mysteries, articles on politics, etc.
Comments
Anonymous said
on 11/22/2005 To break into sportswriting, there are only three rules: write, write some more, and keep writing. There are many sites which accept original contributions; your goal is to build a portfolio of articles that are professionally written and laid out.