Baseball, Blogging and Beat Reporting

Come Nov. 9, the baseball season will be over, but Anne and I still will be talking about the National Pastime.

We will be joined by four of our journalism students for a conference presentation titled “Baseball, Blogging and Beat Reporting: Using a Spring Training Blog to Teach Journalism Students How to Cover a Beat.”

Our presentation will take place in Philadelphia at the Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association conference as part of a Journalism and News Media panel.

As the title of our presentation suggests, we will be discussing how we incorporate a baseball blog into the courses we teach in the Jandoli School of Communication at St. Bonaventure University. We use the blog because St. Bonaventure is located in a rural area of Western New York, where opportunities to cover local governments, school boards and other traditional news beats are limited.

That Time I Started My Journalism Career on Columbus Day

For many people, Columbus Day is a time for parades and a celebration of Italian heritage. Others contend that it is wrong to honor Christopher Columbus as a hero.

For me, Columbus Day is significant for another reason. It was on Columbus Day in 1975 that I spent my first day in a newsroom as a working journalist as a reporter for a suburban weekly named The Montclair Times. more