Make your career. This week, Dorth Raphaely, the general manager of Bleacher Report, was a guest on the Copeland Coaching Podcast, discussing how to create a career in sports.
Angela Copeland is a career coach, and Raphaely discussed his journey, which began with helping in the sports information department of Division III UC-Santa Cruz as an undergraduate and continued through CBS Sports Interactive and Yahoo before landing at B/R in 2011. He was also an assistant women’s basketball coach for the Banana Slugs, by the way.
Whether he’s talking about sports coverage or how to advance in your profession, Raphaely always has the same message: find methods to accomplish something no one else is doing, and you’ll become valuable and irreplaceable.
About the fierce competition for content-creation jobs, Raphaely adds, “We’re looking for folks who have specialised skill sets and are type of experts at it.” “It’s all about finding your expertise and mastering it. Do you work as a feature writer? Are you a journalist who specialises in investigative reporting? Do you write for a newspaper or a magazine? What is your area of expertise? What is your area of expertise?”
Dorth cites Bleacher Report’s paid educational programme in digital sportswriting, the Advanced Program in Sports Media, or APSM, around 36:30. “We travel around to all these different schools,” he says, looking for undergraduate journalism students who are ready to graduate and start their career. We also cater to graduate students and early career professionals.
I was fortunate enough to be one of the ones who made those visits. We’re aiming to visit more schools this year by using Skype, Google Hangouts, or whatever else is devised for the purpose next week to do virtual visits.
The Advanced Program in Editing and Content Management at Bleacher Report is a comparable programme that focuses on copy editing and the numerous career that require it.
Both programmes are open all year and accept applications on a rolling basis. They aren’t bound by the academic calendar. Participants are paid a stipend for 12 weeks of part-time work.
