28/02/22
Today was a great day on placement with Graham Thomas at Dai Sport. Graham has worked as a sports journalist for various professional organisations and provides a quality insight into the demands of working in a professional environment.
The day began with a chat about what I’d like to get out of the experience and what he can offer to help me.
He put a plan together for what I could do over the next few days that I’d be on work placement with him which covered a number of different areas and experiences.
Next, Graham gave me access to the back end of the website. I already had some experience running the back end of a website because I do it for my podcast website. I was responsible for editing and publishing other people’s stories to the Dai Sport website. I learnt about the importance of producing catchy headlines to draw people into the site as well as how to write in the style and structure for the website. I also learnt about how to source free photos from Getty images to accompany the articles.
Graham got me access to the Cardiff City football press conference which was done on zoom. This was great to be involved with and got to watch journalists from BBC, ITV and Wales Online ask Cardiff manager Steve Morrison and player Ryan Wintle questions. I transcribed some of Steve Morrison’s quotes and wrote a quotes-based article for the Dai Sport website and uploaded it to the website in my first piece of published work on the placement.
Some of the quotes from Morrison’s press conference were embargoed until later in the day which taught me how careful a s ports journalist needs to be when producing a story to not include any embargoed content as you can get yourself and your publisher in trouble.
For the rest of the day, I ran the back end of the website again.
01/03/22
Today I got the opportunity to take what I had learnt from sitting in on the Cardiff City press conference as Graham got me access to the press conferences for Cardiff Rugby and Scarlets. Again, these press conferences were held on zoom. Cardiff put up coach Dai Young and players Josh Turnbull and Aled Summerhill. Scarlets put up coach Dwayne Peel and player Rhys Patchell. I got the opportunity to ask questions to young, Turnbull and peel which was a great experience and gave me a lot of confidence in how to approach a press conference and being able to get content that I needed from the interviewees.
I used the content I had got in the press conferences to create a written piece about the coaches for the website and uploaded the piece before looking after the website again.
Then I went to the Cardiff City Stadium to cover the EFL Championship game between Cardiff City and Derby. This was the first time I have experienced being in the press box for a professional football match. I met Graham and headed to the press room where he introduced me to a number of local and national sports journalists who are all good contacts to have.
Graham doesn’t post-match reports on Dai Sport but he wanted me to get a feel for writing professional standard match reports to deadline. He was also covering the game for The Mirror so set me the task of producing a match report with the same word count and structure of what he was writing which I had to send him on the final whistle which was really beneficial for learning how to write a match report live. I also learnt about how important working together with other members of the press can be when getting details such as player names into the report.
After the game I attended the press conference which taught me a lot about how to handle asking questions to players and coaches who were obviously disappointed and agitated.
05/03/22
Today I visited Cardiff Arms Park to write a match report on the Welsh Premiership game between Cardiff and Aberavon. It was great to have Graham with me at Cardiff City to introduce me to people, but it was also good to be on my own and feel a bit more independent today. I produced an on the whistle match report again and also had the chance to interview Cardiff’s Dan Fish and Aberavon’s Aled Thomas pitch side after the game.
07/03/22
Another first for me today as I sat in on a Wales rugby press conference. Wales had Gethin Jenkins and Taulupe Faletau up for interview. The interviews felt a lot more controlled than the regional teams like Jenkins and Faletau were thinking a lot more about what they were saying which brought challenges as journalists had to choose what they were asking and how they were asking it carefully or getting basic useless answers. I worked in a team with the other journalists to each transcribe different parts of the interview which saved everyone time. I wrote a story using quotes from Gethin Jenkins for the website and also wrote a piece using quotes from Faletau although this was embargoed until the next day, so I had to wait to post it.
26/04/22
I got in contact with Gareth Howells at Ebbw Vale who I had completed some work experience at the start of the year and last year. I wanted to produce some video/audio content and I know Gareth is always looking for that for Ebbw Vale, so I had a phone call with two retiring players and made two audio clips for their social media channels.
08/05/22
I have recently started some work placement with Rugby Europe, the organisation that runs all European rugby union competitions below the Six Nations. After first contacting Ben Fox on twitter a few weeks ago, I dropped him and email and we had a call on 29/04/22 where we spoke about what skills and types of content I can provide for RE and how he can help me improve my work, get involved in new things and get my work shown to a global audience.
Over the weekend I watched an international men’s game between Israel and Cyprus and a women’s game between Portugal and Germany and produced match reports for Ben to post on the website. This was quite different because I knew very little about the teams and there isn’t much information out there, so I had to dig pretty deep to get some research to add more depth to the reports.
Last weekend I completed some more match reports for games that have taken place for RE.
I’m going to continue producing work for RE over the summer as I think the opportunity to cover international rugby is brilliant.
Haydn Evans 