Broacasting: It's everywhere I go

I beginning to think I’m on the brink of a revelation as far as career options are concerned. After my blog regarding academics versus athletics in our nation’s schools I’m feeling more motivated to pursue a career in athletic directing or perhaps development at a college or high school. It’s taken me this long to realize that my calling in the professional world doesn’t necessarily involve broadcasting on the surface, but if you look beneath the outside description you can find the many ways broadcasting will play into these two types of careers. Athletic directing and development require daily interaction with the public. You need to know how to communicate adequately and properly with your peers and others you are doing business with. As silly as it seems, reading the news on air for Titan Radio or The County Line here at Westminster has forced me to speak more carefully and with better diction, thus training me for sounding professional upon entering an interview or job/internship setting. I truly believe that speaking properly is in the top three most important tools when you are in an interview or gaining a job. If you’re going around the office Monday morning “hollerin’ ‘bout how dem Stillers beat dem jagoffs from Cleveland again, ‘n at”, you’re clearly not going to be taken seriously, at all. Luckily, though I never have spoken like this before in my life, I have erased much of my Pittsburgh accent that I arrived here with. Though I do have minor slips with the words “slippy”, “gumband”, and “pop”, I feel that for the most part I’m a pretty professional speaker, capable of thriving in a work environment that requires constant communication.
Broadcast writing has prepared me for the world of athletic directing and/or development. This may seem strange, but writing concisely and with descriptive, but not over-the-top, sentences are imperative in the professional world. This, coupled with learning how to write a press release in last semester’s public relations course, is something needed at an athletic directing and/or development job. Athletic directors are responsible for many things, including dispatching scores of games to the local media outlets, contacting other athletic directors regarding games or other matters of business, and sending out newsletters or forms to parents. All these job assignments listed above require some form of concise writing. Media affiliates don’t want to read through endless sentences of play-by-play descriptions of the game. They want to know: final score, score after each quarter, leading two scorers from both teams, and any other vital information about the game (i.e. the leading scorer was out with the flu and was not playing). To do that in today’s world of technology, you text or email the media outlet. More and more TV stations and newspapers are relying less on phone calls after games from athletic directors. You have to be to the point about a game recap or you’re going to make the people publishing the story pretty unhappy. You also won’t win fans or praise if you send out long and over exaggerated newsletters or forms to parents of children in the district. This, too, must be short and easily readable. Whether it’s the athletic director sending the yearly reminder regarding sportsmanship at athletic events or the development director notifying the parents of an upcoming project at the school, these notices must be explanatory, but not overdone. Parents are busy and, at times, may only read over the first few lines of a letter. Make your point in the first few sentences to get their attention and then you have a much better chance of them reading the rest.
There are many other ways broadcasting will help me when I embark on one of these careers. Media management, a BC elective I took last spring, taught me the value of using the media as an aide for promoting a particular event or happening. Broadcast Journalism gave me a broad perspective of how to use certain media elements. It could prove important someday if the school needs someone to be interviewed by a local media outlet. Going into the interview, I can safely say that I would know what types of questions would be asked and how I can answer them. In the worst case scenario, I could do some major damage control if the school district I am working for gets them into some trouble. It’s good to know the ins and outs of the media. Building relationships with the media is a must. It’s their business to know you and what’s going on with your program, so should you make it your business to know them and how they’re going about that.
There are so many more aspects of broadcasting that could potentially play out in either of these careers. However, there are so many that it would take far too long to list them all out on this blog. The ones listed above are the most vital ones to those careers. I never thought I’d say this, but broadcasting really does play into these careers more than I ever thought it would. The benefits of the major are endless and, hopefully, they will help me when I go to land that big job someday. For now, I’ll just keep it concise by saying that broadcasting, as a whole, has more than prepared me to speak, write, and overall communicate extraordinarily for whatever future career I decide to undertake.