My personal experience
March rolled along after my first month or so of working with prost, and I was starting to get a lot busier managing assessments and my dissertation around work. The prost international USW group chat began to fade and was no longer as active on a regular basis. I thought I should explain to Steve Clare and Chris Stonage why I wasn’t writing as frequently as I used to. They were so kind and understanding of everyone’s schedules, and that dissertations were prioritised by myself and others, that I took a break from writing for prost. When April rolled around, I was right back into things, however this time instead of sending my pieces to Chris through email, I had my own log in information for the wordpress website and was writing my stuff there instead. Only now did I have to understand the authors guide, which was a challenge in itself, but I quickly overcame it and continued to work for prost. It was also exciting to step outside of my comfort zone and cover a variety of sports that I had never covered previously.
The feedback I received and my responses to it
For starters, now that I was making posts on the general chat, which has a far higher proportion of prost authors, I was receiving more critical feedback, which I appreciated. Not from Steve or Chris, but from prost editors. My feedback was now huge paragraphs on how I needed to learn the writers guide, but my writing was good enough that an editor granted me accreditation to cover rugby games after seeing one of my rugby pieces. This was a huge compliment because it was my first-time covering rugby league, and he believed my knowledge of the game and the data I included were excellent. Although I graciously declined, he provided me with valuable insight about covering new sports and breaking out of your comfort zone. I discovered that you don’t have to be a fan of something to write about it. Anyway, my reaction to all of this was, of course, to study the writers guide, which was a bit difficult at first, but then to continue producing pieces, even ones that I felt uncomfortable with. Ones that truly motivated me to spend more time researching the issue and gathering data and statistics to include. This simply boosted my confidence and, I believe, made me a better journalist overall.
The skills I learnt and further developed
I think it goes without saying that while on placement with prost, I learned a lot of skills such as communication, teamwork, writing, and time management, to mention a few. However, I believe the new qualities I learned were those of writing about sports that I had never covered before. Although I’m not sure what the exact term for this ability is, I do know that it is a skill to be more versatile as a journalist and to be able to extend out of your comfort zone and cover areas you may have never even considered covering before. It helped me discover you don’t need to pursue one avenue, there are so many options with whatever you want to cover with prost and you aren’t tied down to one thing, even if you think that’s the best sport that you write about.
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