Given the Chance

From the fall of 2004 until the spring of 2005, it wasn’t uncommon to see the bundle of newspapers from The Oregonian sitting in front of the principal’s office at McMinnville High School a little disheveled. The stack would arrive around 7:30 a.m. every day. By 7:45, at least one of those papers would go missing.

That’s because I would steal it. I’d then take it back to the student newspaper offices, dropping the sports, business and living sections and hold on to news and metro.

I took a newspaper production class during zero period — which started at 7 a.m. — my senior year of high school. We were constantly asking to get an individual subscription for the newsroom, but the word from the administration was … well, I forget the exact reason, but suffice it to say we didn’t like it. I decided to start stealing the paper.

My day as a ‘sports’ reporter

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Flickr user MDGovpics.

I give the sports staff at The Emerald a lot of shit.

I make fun of the baffling number of statistics and trivia sports reporters imbue their tweets with. I goad them for using strange-sounding words such as “winningnest.” And now I understand why they do it all.

When you’re facing a similar set of circumstances from day to day, it’s tough to be creative with your words. How do you keep readers engaged, stave off vocabulary fatigue and maintain a steady stream of content going on a beat where Team A is always going to beat or tie with Team B and access to the playmakers is limited?

The answers are simple: stats, creative word choice and an unwavering love for anything and everything to do with your beat. Over the course of 14 hours on a Sunday, I tried my hand at tweeting like a sports reporter and the results were interesting.