Journalism is a competitive career area and without prior experience you will find it difficult to gain formal work experience on sports desks.
It’s likely that you will have to learn to be a journalist before you can become a sports writer. To help your chances:
- Develop a portfolio of your work
- Build up your core journalistic skills
- Personal branding and your online presence are important - create a LinkedIn profile, follow journalists, organisations and employers on social media and create a blog to showcase your skills and get your name noticed
- Network in order to find contacts that might help you find work experience
- Consider gaining a specialist qualification
How to find experience
Advertised work placement/experience schemes in this sector are rare. Most students gain experience through voluntary work and speculative approaches to relevant organisations. In career areas such as journalism you will need to gain experience outside of sport first in order to build up the key skills required.
Starting points where you can begin to develop your skills and experience could include:
Further study
While a postgraduate qualification isn’t essential, it will give you a good grounding in writing, interviewing, editing, design and layout, shorthand and media law. To give you an idea of the popularity and usefulness of these courses, 73% of qualified journalists are NCTJ trained (About us - NCTJ).
There are a range of postgraduate journalism courses but completion for places can be tough, look for those accredited by the NCTJ OR BJTC.
Useful resources
- The Sports Journalists Association (SJA) - An excellent resource for researching this career area, training courses, and sourcing graduate opportunities, including work experience schemes in newspapers, magazines and broadcast.
- ITV - Offer work experience placements in broadcasting throughout their regional TV centres. Use the job search tool to find opportunities.
- Creative Access is a charity set up to help tackle the under-representation of ethnic minorities in the media. They offer internships in a range of areas including journalism.
- Careers in Sport - For vacancies, events, and a really useful section on Careers Profiles, where you can view interviews with a wide range of successful professionals in a variety of roles (including journalist) in the sports industry.
- Sport Business - The world’s leading supplier of information, media and B2B marketing services to the sports industry. Their website is also an excellent source of information if you are thinking of working in marketing, PR, sponsorship, events and media.
Further help
Find useful resources and book an appointment with a careers adviser on the Careers Network website.