Joe Gisondi, who I will have the great pleasure to serve with this fall on the faculty at Eastern Illinois University, started a blog a few months ago – On Sports. It explores his passion for sports reporting. You really should read it. It’s a great example of how a practitioner (and now a teacher) can explain the nuances of a field for those who are attempting to learn the craft. Check out this post about creative non-fiction for just a taste. #

Joe does what I don’t often do here on the ICM blog, take a subject and explore it in detail. It’s a different kind of blogging that I don’t find myself suited for. But I admire Joe for the dedication, and I have him in my RSS reader because of these kinds of thought-provoking details: #

Once, while covering a story for a magazine, I needed to describe a moment from a football practice that I had never attended. To some in journalism, this is heresy. But the moment helped define a defensive back I had been assigned to profile. So I asked this college player to describe the scene – everything from how the play evolved to the weather and what others were wearing. I then posed some of the same questions to others at the scene to ensure the facts were correct. For example, the defensive back said the temperature was in the low 80s, and another person said it was hot (a much more subjective term.) A check of the national weather service verified the temperature in the area was in the 80s. As a result, I felt confident enough to report this (and several other) facts about the moment. That’s what a writer needs to do. But how do you verify thoughts? A writer can ask others if the source has repeated these comments before or can check letters and other writings to determine if these ideas had been repeated at other times. But, ultimately, one cannot always verify thoughts. Reporters do use this in stories, but on a more superficial scale. For example, a sports reporter might ask a batter what he was thinking right before he hit the game-winning double, but who’s to know if those were the batters’ actual thoughts. Journalists, though, usually feel much more uncomfortable digging into thoughts in much more depth and length to report stories in newspapers (and, to a lesser degree, in some magazines). #

Did I mention that Joe started blogging after I suggested in a presentation that every student – and professor – should find an opportunity to practice blogging for six months (an idea I use thanks to Howard Owens)? Well, that’s the kind of thing that makes an educator beam. Good work, Joe. #

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