An Intern’s View of the Football FanCast Internship Scheme

I will readily admit that prior to this internship scheme I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. It is the case with many people these days that they go to university and get a degree without having an inclination of what they want to do with their life when the course is over. I was one of these people, and it was just another day of moping about the fact that I was no longer a sponging student when I came across the Football FanCast Internship scheme. As an avid football fan my interest was piqued and I applied and, to my delight, I was soon a football writing intern!

At the beginning of November we all met up for a training day – it was a very productive day as we were introduced to the world of football writing. We were taught everything we needed to know; how to create an interesting article with a title that will gather interest, how to use the programmes we’d need to get our work onto the net and how to promote our work. By the end of the day I’d already uploaded articles onto the site for the world to see and had plenty of guidance to help me find my feet writing regularly for the site.

We were eased into it to begin with; after being given a weekly plan to inform us what we’d be writing about well in advance we were told we’d be writing just a couple of articles a day to begin with. We were also given lots of support as the staff checked on us to make sure we were finding things okay. It was established that we would have weekly conference calls with our editor Martin Crawford and managing directors Niall Coen and Sarah Kennedy. These calls would allow us to express how we were finding everything and allow Martin, Niall and Sarah to go over how everything was going and plans for the next week with us. We would also write up a weekly report as to how each of our articles had done, seeing how many views we’d gotten.

We were soon moved onto writing more articles, moving to four a day with three going onto Football FanCast and another onto the Transfer Tavern with articles varying from normal opinion pieces to specific player pieces such as “The Boy Has Got Skills” or “Whatever Happened To” which would call on us to research particular players, these types of articles were great at teaching us how to properly research a subject as often it would be hard to find sufficient sources and a more thorough check was needed.

And there were other projects along with the article writing – we got to help build FFC’s Fans Wiki, each being given a World Cup host city and four World Cup qualifying nations to research and write up about. I found this project particularly interesting as it gave me a chance to find out more about other international teams and the city of Johannesburg which certainly has an interesting history to it.

On the article front, our weekly plans were accompanied by daily choices by Martin who would give us each a new going-on in the footballing world to write about. We were already settling into writing articles by this point and it was great to be given a vast variety of subjects to write about as we went through everything going on in English football.

A buddy feedback system was also introduced where we would each regularly comment on the work of a fellow intern for a week and would then give them points as to what was good and what could do with improving as who is better to judge a writer’s writing than their fellow writers?

As the weeks progressed we were also given competitions to get some friendly competition going between the interns; there would be awards for most read article, most twitter followers, editor’s challenges (they consisted of us coming up with our own topics and whoever got the most reads won this) and an intern’s intern award where we voted for our favourite article nominated by our fellow articles. All these awards would be handed out at our midway meeting in December.

Said meeting which occurred midway through December (you can read more about it on the blog on here) was a very fun, friendly day. We discussed how things were going, each shared advice to each other and we even played some pool! Everyone enjoyed themselves and the day could be considered a great success.

We were kindly given less work to do over the Christmas and New Years period, with extra days off and the option to get the articles done early to have a prolonged holiday meaning that we could relax over the festive period. I wrote all my articles for the Christmas week the weekend before and enjoyed a relaxing week. Well, as relaxing as being with family can be!

In this time Martin outlined to us that the guys at FFC had decided to give us more freedom over our articles we’d write and the editor’s choice article became intern’s choice as we were allowed to come up with even more of our own ideas. I found it quite challenging to regularly find good subject matter to write on but there was always something out there that would interest me and I got through a range of subjects for a number of teams.

I’ve been writing regularly for FFC and the Transfer Tavern for over 2 months now and my confidence is very high. I’ve written about many subjects, written many different styles of article, built up an internet following, helped create a useful guide in the form of the Wiki and learned to deal with praise and criticism. The guys at FFC have all been very helpful, always proving available if we had any queries and I have nothing but gratitude to them all for their help. I also must hand out praise to Tom Jones, a man taken on as an intern prior to the rest of us who has guided us just as helpfully as Sarah, Niall and Martin and has helped us with most of the projects on the site.

The whole experience has been very enjoyable, I’ve never felt overwhelmed by the amount of work, if I have a problem with an article chosen for me to write about then Martin will happily change it for another and I feel like my writing skills have improved and I’m much more suited to being a journalist than I had been prior to the internship. It had once been just a fancy but now I know I’d love to go on to work in football journalism, it’s very, very enjoyable! I’d like to proffer my appreciation to Niall, Martin, Sarah and Tom and say that if you have an interest in writing about football and get the chance to go on an internship scheme like the one FFC offers then take it with both hands – you won’t regret it!