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CoBL's looking for new writers & interns

06/28/2018, 10:45am EDT

By Josh Verlin

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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As City of Basketball Love begins preparing for the 2018-19 season, we’re also beginning our search for our writing staff for our seventh season of existence.

Over the last six years, CoBL has become a terrific training ground for high school and college writers. Writing for CoBL means getting a chance to cover Philadelphia’s rich basketball scene, from over 100 high school programs in the area through numerous Division II and Division III teams as well as the City 6 (Drexel, La Salle, Penn, St. Joe’s, Temple & Villanova) and several other regional Division I programs.

We’ve had over 50 different young reporters contribute significantly over the years, and many of them have gone on to further their journalism careers -- our former high school writers now studying journalism at schools like Arizona State, Syracuse, Indiana, Temple and more; our college writers moving on to professional jobs in journalism, social media and public relations/sports information.

Now we’re looking for the next group of young scribes to join the team.

There are two different writing opportunities currently available for high school and college students:

We will be hiring four college students as paid interns. These students, who must have some prior sportswriting experience, will receive $2000 for the season (October-March) and will be expected to cover on average two games per week, as well as write feature stories. While these writers will receive guidance along the way and editing on their stories, they should already possess a strong grasp of grammar, writing ledes and interviewing abilities.

Something I’m taking especially seriously this year is our commitment for a more diverse staff. Sports journalism -- and this site’s staff in general -- have been dominated by white men, and we’d like to do our part. Therefore, of these four interns, at least one must be a woman/non-binary individual and one must be a minority/person of color.

For those who are interested in sportswriting but have little or no prior experience, don’t fret! CoBL is a great place to start. We’ve helped dozens of high school and college students who’ve never covered a game or press conference in their lives get off the ground, through an unpaid internship that basically serves as a crash course in sportswriting.

Interested students will start by accompanying one of CoBL’s senior writers to games and events, learning on-the-job for several weeks or months before finally branching out on their own. All CoBL interns get coached through the writing process, from story pitching to interview prep, how to cover a game or press conference and of course how to write the story itself. Once the intern has made significant progress, there are potential opportunities to transition into paid work.

If you’re interested in writing for CoBL, please send us an email: cityofbasketballlove@gmail.com. Please tell us a bit about yourself, attach any writing samples -- if you don’t have any prior journalism experience, a research paper will suffice -- and a resumé, and we’ll get back to you shortly.

Thanks,
Josh Verlin