Using football to s/tell a story

So I’m here in Moshi, in the newly constructed outdoor ‘office’ planning the finishing touches to day one’s training for the tournament.

The objective to get both sports journalists and leaders to know what kind of stories sell.

We’ll be looking at ‘hooks’ or ‘news pegs’, and how to hang your story to them: and looking at why things don’t go well. For example we are in the middle of an eventful Confederations Cup, which is a big story here in Africa, especially in the run up to the 2010 World Cup: so not the perfect time to sell a ‘sports for development’ story to a sports editor because they are pretty busy.

But you might want to the editor of the features or health desk about how people are using sport to combat aids: they might be looking for ways of getting people interested in their pages and using football could be great way of doing this.

I used football once to sell a story to the education pages of the Guardian, a national newspaper in Britain. It’s no longer on the newspaper’s site, but was copied onto a West Ham fan site:

http://jlmd.blogspot.com/2007/03/english-for-footballers.html?showComment=1203638400000

To be honest it's not an amazing story but I thought the education editor might be happy to have an excuse to put football on his pages, especially at a time when expensive foreign players were a novelty and getting attention elsewhere in the press.

In the same way, you might use a football 'hook' to sell the story of the great community work your organisation is doing in your area, or to get across a health message... after all if football can be used to sell football boots or deodorant there's no harm in using it to sell your story to the world.


Nick

PS shame Rio can’t make it – who else would make a good interviewee?