Deez Interviews: Meet the college athletics reporter on how sports are the snickerdoodles of news
Happy Friday, Deezers! Today’s interview is with Brandon Foster, a sports reporter who covers the University of Wyoming athletics for the Casper Star-Tribune. He talked to us about his fave sports to cover, his beef with digital outlets like The Athletic, and how it’s not all about having the ESPN-level hot takes out there. Enjoy!
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The interviewee: Brandon Foster (follow him @bfoster91!)
The gig: Athletics beat reporter at the Casper Star-Tribune
The daily hustle: Personally, my day-to-day routine is a little abnormal, because I actually live in Laramie, which is two hours south of Casper. That's where the University of Wyoming is, and it makes much more sense for me to be there, but the side effect is that I don't work in a newsroom. So, I do a lot of working from my apartment or in coffee shops.
What's not abnormal about my routine is the unusual schedule. That comes pretty standard in sports writing, because they tend to schedule games at night and/or on weekends. And, covering a college beat, the work is also heavily tied to the school year. I'm far busier from August-May than I am during the summer.
But, to give you an idea, during football season, we run a weekly wraparound section on each game day, so I spend my weeks working on the #content for that as well as about two stories for each daily paper. And then on Saturdays, I cover the games, traveling on Friday and Sunday if they're on the road. On Sundays I write some recap stuff. Then I do it all over again.
Before Wyoming, you also covered college athletics at the University of Missouri. How does your beat differ between schools?
Wyoming is a pretty unique place in terms of college sports, just because there's only one four-year college in the entire state. So it really is THE team here. The fandom is very connected to identity here…
The biggest difference in my experience at Wyoming has been the access. Columbia, Missouri, is flooded with journalists both because of Missouri's J-school and because it's is a larger market than Laramie.
Here, I'm one of two main beat writers that covers the university, so I generally get far more access than I did at Missouri. But at both places, I was lucky enough to overlap with some big, national stories. I was at Missouri during the football boycott, and I've been in Wyoming to cover quarterback Josh Allen, who could be the first player selected in the upcoming NFL Draft. So, it's been very interesting to watch a program in Wyoming that doesn't typically get much national attention suddenly get name-dropped on SportsCenter on the reg.
What sport is most interesting to cover as a reporter?
Wrestlers are the best quotes. Baseball is the easiest to keep stats of. But, I mostly cover football and basketball, so, boring as this answer is, I'm going to have to go with football. I love basketball, but the sheer size of the roster in football makes for a little more unpredictability. Plus, college football has such a distinct culture.
But really, I don't think any sport is that far ahead of the others for me. I kind of thought when I got into full-time sports journalism that I'd get more jaded about actual sports, but my experience has been the opposite. The more you cover it, the more you appreciate the artistry of sports and the incredible things that inevitably happen. The way that the storylines write themselves can be truly mind-boggling sometimes.
Plenty of young'uns go into sports media wanting to be the next ESPN commentator or at Grantland personality. What are some common misconceptions people have about being in sports journalism?
I guess the biggest misconception about being in sports journalism is the idea that having hot takes is important. Don't get me wrong, the sports world is as take-driven as it gets. That's something that ESPN played up a lot over the last decade or so, and Twitter obviously hasn't helped, but it's also something sports fans are just used to from the days of talk radio.
But while there are still Professional Opinion Havers, the best sports journalists and the people who do the most interesting stuff are those who do the best reporting and who know how to write.
It's good to be informed enough on topics that you can have an opinion, of course, and there are times, I think, where a well-reported column serves a certain purpose that a non-opinion piece can't. But as much as I'd love to be on, for example, Around the Horn, what makes those people bearable is the fact that they're all good reporters when they're not arguing on ESPN.
Ok, here's a dumb question we’ve always wondered: do you have to be a serious sports fan to be a good sports reporter?
Yes and no.
On the one hand, there are ways in which being a fan is detrimental to being a good reporter (being a homer, e.g.). The majority of the work you do has nothing to do with being a fan and can be done just as well if not better by a good reporter who grew up not caring about sports.
At the same time, there is a lot of sports knowledge that will come very handy in sports writing, and for people like me who grew up sports fans, you don't really remember ever purposefully learning that stuff. It's just something that has been ingrained since childhood.
I often think about how much sports minutiae and how many rules you're just expected to know and the fact that no one ever taught us that in journalism school or in Sports Rules 1000 or anything like that.
I would think you could make it as an autodidact if you didn't grow up a sports fan, though honestly I wouldn't even know where to start. Plus, while sports can be an intriguing and even poetic microcosm of society, I'm not sure why you'd want to put up with a lot of the bullshit that exists in the sports world if you weren't already into it.
There’s been a recent spate of digital sports media startups like The Athletic, who are gaining steam with some pretty interesting business models — all of which are based on weakening local papers' sports sections. As a reporter who's worked for local papers for years, what are your thoughts on these startups?
At first, The Athletic was a feel-good story, because a bunch of sports writers had just gotten laid off, and it gave them a place to land. That's also why I think it has seemingly succeeded from the jump. Their staff of writers is arguably unmatched.
I subscribed, for example, because the main Blues beat writer left the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for The Athletic. And I can certainly see why so many established writers have chosen to do the same.
It's hard out here for a scribe, and The Athletic appears to offer a significantly better working environment. My main concern is that newspapers have always seemed to rely on something else besides actual news to pay the bills.
In the past it was the classifieds, for example, and now those are all on Craigslist. Sports sections aren't an exact analogue there, because they include journalism in and of themselves, but I would imagine capitalizing on the sports market has always been critical to print sales. You might wonder what's so problematic about each individual part of a paper being co-opted by a separate online entity, but the thing is, I think that a newspaper's most valuable contribution to its community is hard news.
And hard news is sort of like the vegetables of the paper. I'm not sure that it's ever going to sell itself, unlike sports, which is obviously a snickerdoodle cookie.
I'm ranting here, but to bring it back to The Athletic, I just hope that the lesson of its (apparent) success is not "Welp, papers are screwed," but instead that newspapers need to invest in good staffs, because people are actually willing to spend money on things they think are worth it (see: Patreon).
Finally, what's a piece you've published recently that you're most proud of, and why?
Hm, this isn't super recent, but this story took more reporting than anything else I've done in Wyoming. Like the best sports writing, it's only tangentially a sports story. (Or, if you don't want to read all that, here's a preview story for Wyoming basketball's game against Drake, which includes a Drake reference in every non-quote sentence. See if you can find all 19!)
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Did you find them??? Don’t forget to follow Brandon at @bfoster91, and have a great weekend!
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