A chance to enhance your journalistic skills

I have found my experience of writing for FootballFanCast to be very enjoyable and of huge benefit to myself.

The three months that I spent producing articles went very quickly and I think that is mainly because writing the articles has been very exciting, both due to my love of football and the way that FootballFanCast have designed their internship scheme. As I progressed through the scheme I was able to enhance my journalistic skills in terms of writing a story, spotting and sourcing a story and picking an appropriate angle for the story.

When I first started I had a good idea of what to expect as it had been made clear to me in the interview stage by the MD, Niall Coen, of what they were looking for. Prior to the project starting it sounded like everything I was looking for and the reality lived up to the expectation. Firstly I had an introduction day where I got to meet my fellow interns and my editor, Martin Crawford. I was given a refresher on how the scheme would be run and how our weekly reads for the website would be calculated to measure our own performance. Another interesting aspect was how the site used social media to promote its work and the unique techniques that were being utilised.

Having had some experience writing essays for university from home I realised that a potential problem of finding motivation could occur but this never proved to be the case on this internship. Straight away I was given insightful and interesting articles to write about and not once did I ever receive a task that wouldn’t keep me going or not excite me. Whilst there naturally had to be a love of football for me to be motivated and to have a chance of doing well on this scheme, the structure of it was spot on and it couldn’t have been outlined any better.

I was gradually eased into the project by writing two articles a day that were given to me by my editor with a few breaks here and there. By the end of the scheme we were all choosing the majority of our stories for ourselves and each other and we were writing  over 10 articles a week at least. At times it could all seem fairly demanding but if I had any problems about the workload then my editor would gladly see to any of my queries and advise me on how to best proceed.

At the end of the internship I’d had my work read by nearly 250,000 people and it’s staggering to imagine that my articles could generate that much interest. However the fact of the matter is that my articles did do that well, and it’s thanks to FootballFanCast that I’ve had the opportunity to share my work with so many people. Not many places give you a chance like this and I’m pleased that they gave me the opportunity to show off my skills. I believe that I am now a much better writer because of this internship scheme and the experience that I’ve gained could prove invaluable to helping my career as a journalist.

Charlie Rowing