Amy Moritz Speaks at JLM 312 Class
Amy Moritz skyped into the JLM 312 class at SUNY Oswego to talk about her career in sports journalism. Amy is a beat writer for the Buffalo News and mostly covers the Buffalo Sabres. She also covers other teams in the area including the Buffalo Bisons and the Buffalo Bills.
Amy said that covering the Sabres comes with some challenges so she is always being creative about her story ideas. Hockey players in general tend to be more reserved and answer interviews with standard answers so sometimes the stories become repetitive. Amy has made her stories more interesting by writing about topics that include how sleep helps a players performance and their mental health. These ideas come to Amy out of nowhere sometimes and other times they are her own curiosities which she wants to find more information on. Amy said her idea about the sleep story came from her own curiosity about how her running could be improved.
Another challenge that comes with covering the Sabres is that they don’t win a lot. Readers will get bored if they keep reading stories about the Sabres losing and players will not want to answer the same question about why they are not winning. Amy finds other ways to cover the Sabres by finding those deeper stories that focus on the players or something besides the team’s loss.
One creative story Amy did was when Brian Gionta played in his one thousandth hockey game. Instead of interviewing Gionta and making the story about him, Amy interviewed his wife Harvest. This offered a different perspective than similar stories like this which caught more readers’ attention. Gionta played one thousand games but his wife was able to talk about what it was like going to all those games and how it affected the family since they have three kids.
When Amy’s covering a game, she is on social media letting her followers know what is happening. After the game, the coach will address all of the media and answer questions, and the players will be in the media locker room if they want to talk to the media. Sometimes there is only a couple players in the locker room and a lot of different reporters that want to talk to them. When this happens usually every reporter has a player they are comfortable talking to that they will interview first. Sometimes these media scrums can get crazy but usually everyone is able to talk to the players they want to.
When hockey season is over, Amy covers the Buffalo Bisons, the Toronto Blue Jays Triple A affiliate. During baseball season, it is more relaxed and the players have more time to do interviews becasue of how much time they have for batting practice and warmups.
Amy also talked about how the media field is changing in terms of gender. Amy has not had many issues with being a women in a male dominated field. Amy said that male reporters and players also have a low tolerance for discrimination of any sort and that if anything does happen someone usually addresses it right away.
