Tom Rostance - Part 2

But let's talk about your professional career, because, as you say, you have covered literally hundreds of games live.

So you started off, I think, with the Press Association.

Is that right? Yeah.

So talk a little bit how you got to that, because a lot of people who listen to this podcast are sort of interested in a career in sports journalism.

And there are lots of different routes.

But tell us how you got there.

So I did a degree in journalism, not sports journalism, because there wasn't any around then.

There's loads now, but I don't think there was any at all.

So maybe one or two.

So, yeah, I did a journalism degree and.

in my final year kind of specialized in newspaper journalism, which is, I always think it's quite funny in hindsight that basically as soon as I did that, they all started dying out.

But we, I was at the university of central Lancashire, which is in Preston.

And it's quite, it, it certainly was at the time had a good sort of reputation and, And they had these long standing sort of links with various media outlets where people would go on placements and stuff.

So I didn't actually go to PA on placement.

I did a week at the Guardian and I did bits and bobs elsewhere.

But quite a few guys off our course had been to PA and had basically been offered jobs for as soon as they finished placement.

So I didn't get that, but what I did do was, so I finished in the summer and then by sort of Christmas time, they had some jobs going basically, and they had, um, they used to do a trainee scheme, which was like a two year contract where you would go in and learn the ropes.

So I got one of those and started in the sort of January after my graduation, if you like.

Um, yeah.

And that involved writing for loads of different sort of mediums, including teletext used to write for teletext, which, um, There's another thing that ages me now.

Yeah.

And there's loads of people I've still worked with today who were there at the same time.

And, you know, loads of people from PA went on to do really well.

And I think it was just a good place to start because it really, it was a bit of a churning stuff out, you know, it was like, but it made you be able to write quickly and accurately and concisely, I guess, which is a skill in itself.

And writing for Teletext was like, Because word count is so low and, you know, you had to get everything into four tight paragraphs, which is a really good skill to have even now.