Griffith media courses for Sports
What do Setanta Sports, the Irish Star, Mirror, Sun, Independent and 98 FM have in common? They all have Griffith graduates as sports journalists.
These sports mad Griffith alumni have over the years found homes in some of Ireland’s top news media outlets.
Michelle Fortune. Owen Cowzer and Mark McCadden were all graduates in 2000 of our honours degree programme which is now a BA in Journalism and Visual Media. Michelle works in Dublin based Setanta Sports as an online news editor and writer. Owen is the Football Correspondent for the Irish Sun, while Mark writes about Soccer in the Irish Star.
A slightly older alumni from Griffith is Paul O’Hehir. You can find his sports coverage in the Irish Mirror. Paul graduated from what is now our BA in Journalism programme in 1999. Independent Newspaper’s Conor McKeon graduated in 2006 and he writes on all things GAA. 2008 graduate Gareth Maher can be found across a range of papers including the Irish Times and Daily Mail. Finally there is 98FM sports reporter Darren Cleary.
It doesn’t have to stop in Ireland. Check out another Griffith graduate Kevin Egan on ESPN. You can see his highlights on YouTube.
Griffith’s media courses don’t guarantee to make you a successful sports writer or broadcaster. They will give you the tools for creating exciting work and help you take those first critical steps to career in the media.
Making it in sports journalism requires an encyclopaedic knowledge of your specialist areas, a bottomless capacity to sit in wet and windy parks before you get to the comfort of stadia press boxes, and let’s be honest there are not many of them in Ireland.
You also need the ability to offer compelling commentary on the sports issues of the day, whether it is tweeting, minute by minute match commentary, reports, interviews, opinion pieces or maybe TV and radio documentaries.
Our record shows that the first important steps can be made at Griffith. The transfer window might have closed but there is still time to apply to Griffith College’s Journalism and Media Communications Faculty.