JOURNALISM EXPERIENCE

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Assistant sports audience engagement editor

The Michigan Daily

September 2019-April 2021

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• Helped run the Michigan Daily sports section's social media accounts, including a verified Twitter account, @theblockm, with over 15,000 followers

• Scheduled and wrote copy for Tweets promoting sports section content; drafted tweets that earned the account follows from The Athletic Detroit and the Michigan men's basketball team

• Helped design and execute larger campaigns to drive larger reader engagement on social media that helped elevate the account to 2.65 million impressions in March 2021, the most in at least seven years: 

  • Devised and executed "Today in Michigan History" campaign, a yearlong Twitter campaign that utilized archives to engage audience with memorable events in Michigan athletic history; wrote the most successful tweet of 2021 with over 353,000 impressions and 19,000 engagements

  • Led social media strategy for Women's History Month initiative, consistently promoting stories, graphics, layouts and multimedia created for the initiative on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and The Daily's newsletter

  • Promoted The Daily's special rivalry edition and corresponding fundraiser through campaign that paired story retrospectives with multimedia calling back to enduring moments in the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry; helped raise over $11,000 through fundraiser, out-raising Ohio State's newspaper The Lantern

• Spearheaded creation of a monthly analytics report, using Google Analytics to find the most popular stories of each month, creating reports to send to staffers and using the information to inform content strategy

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Football beat writer

The Michigan Daily

​April 2019 - February 2021

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• Attended home, away and postseason Michigan football games and regular media availabilities, writing 3-4 stories per week

• Wrote game stories, sidebars, advances, columns and features on deadline, including three of the top 10 most read Michigan Daily sports stories of the 2019-20 school year

• Contributed previews and features for "Football Saturday" special edition during the 2019 season

• Regularly appeared on The Daily's "Highway to Hail" podcast and the WTKA radio show "Inside the Huddle," discussing the football team with other beat writers

• During the offseason, covered football breaking news and spring camp and write feature stories on non-revenue sports

• As sports writer, compiled over 250 bylines across 23 sports

• Was previously men's basketball beat writer during the 2018-19 season and softball beat writer during the 2018 season​

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Sports reporting intern

USA Today

June 2020-August 2020

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• Reported and wrote stories across a variety of sports for print, online and special sections

• Wrote six original enterprise features both on assignment and from pitches, focusing on the impact of social issues and COVID-19 on athletes in Olympic and college sports

• Worked with breaking news team, evaluating trending stories for newsworthiness, writing news briefs and occasionally conducting additional reporting

• Contributed to ongoing "Day Without Sports" series, researching and writing about significant moments in sports history and adding engagement-friendly elements such as videos and social posts

• Conducted content research for USA Today special projects; compiled information, requested public records and entered and analyzed data; wrote and co-reported a piece on the financial impact of non-conference game cancellations that was part of a series that placed in the top 10 in the 2020 Associated Press Sports Editors Contest in the Projects category

• Scheduled posts for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram using SocialNewsDesk and Later

• Completed internship remotely due to the pandemic

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Senior sports editor

The Michigan Daily

September 2019 - August 2020

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• Worked one production shift per week, preparing stories for print and online publication

• Edited all sports stories that came in during shift for grammar, structure and style and read through pages before going to print

• Wrote captions for online stories

• Helped select writers to beat and editor positions every semester and attended biweekly Daily-wide management meetings

• Was previously assistant sports editor from January 2018-April 2019

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Sports reporting intern

Cape Cod Times

June 2019 - August 2019

 

• Compiled over 50 bylines as a primary beat writer for the Cape Cod Baseball League, the most prestigious summer collegiate baseball league in the country

• Attended 3-4 games per week, writing game stories on a strict deadline

• Pitched and wrote weekly short features and notebooks for "Cape League Extra" section, as well as two longer features that ran on A1, one of which was picked up by the Associated Press

• Co-hosted "Cape League Corner" podcast, researching and discussing league trends and coordinating and interviewing guests

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Freelance sports writer

May 2018 - present

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Freelance work includes:​

• USA Today, September 2020: Contributed 1000-word feature on the Big Ten student reaction to the return of football

• Detroit Free Press, December 2018: Contributed an instant game story, postgame video and a sidebar for the Michigan men's basketball team's win over Binghamton. The sidebar ran in print in the New Year's Eve edition of the Free Press

• UMHoops.com, December 2018: Contributed postgame video and a "five takeaways" piece for the Michigan men's basketball team's win over Air Force

• The Associated Press, September-December 2018: Worked as a stringer for Michigan football and men's basketball, researching statistics, finding social media highlights, attending press conferences and transcribing quotes

• Detroit News, May 2018: Contributed a game story for the Michigan softball team's loss to Michigan State in the quarterfinals of the Big Ten Tournament

• Transcribe quotes on a freelance basis for professional journalists; have transcribed for stories published in The Washington Post, The Athletic and Sports Illustrated

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RELATED EXPERIENCE

 

Art(Seen) blogger

Arts at Michigan

October 2017 - April 2018, January 2020-present

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• Write previews and reviews of arts events on campus and in Ann Arbor for Art(Seen), a blog run by Arts at Michigan

• Attended and reviewed a wide range of events to aid in arts outreach to the university community

• Edit and publish stories using WordPress

• Review music, film, dance and theatre

• During COVID-19 outbreak, expanded into reviewing TV shows and books, focusing on work that explored the intersection between sports, culture and everyday life

• For a full archive of my work, see http://artsatmichigan.umich.edu/seen/author/amgerson/.

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Communications chair

Writer to Writer

September 2019-present

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• Help to produce an annual print edition and monthly blog posts for student-run literary journal affiliated with the Sweetland Minor in Writing

• Evaluate and copy-edit submissions for publication, including fiction, non-fiction, poetry and multimodal work

• Spearheaded the creation of the publication's Twitter account

• Run Twitter and Instagram accounts for the journal

• Brainstorm strategies for marketing, fundraising and outreach

• Help plan and execute larger events for student writers at the University

• The issue I helped produce can be viewed digitally at https://issuu.com/writertowriter/docs/issue2-final.

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SPECIAL PROJECTS​

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• November 2018: Researched and wrote about Michigan's 1989 win over Ohio State as part of a special edition honoring the best wins in program history

• February 2019: With three other writers, created an oral history of  the 1989 title-winning Michigan men's basketball team; conducted and transcribed interviews and helped compile and edit the final oral history; copy-edited stories for larger special edition on the last 30 years of Michigan basketball

• May 2019: With one other writer, conducted phone interviews with 27 former men's basketball beat writers and compiled and edited transcripts into an alumni reflection of John Beilein's time at Michigan after his move to the Cleveland Cavaliers

• November 2019: Contributed a column and game preview to The Daily's Rivalry Edition with Ohio State's student newspaper, The Lantern, ahead of The Game

• February 2020: Traveled to East Lansing to provide breaking news coverage of Michigan State coach Mark Dantonio's retirement press conference

• July 2020: With USA Today special projects editor Steve Berkowitz, created a database of non-conference college football contracts; read and logged data from hundreds of contracts; analyzed data for series of stories on the elimination of non-conference games

• Summer 2020: Contributed to USA Today special sections including the college football, NFL and fantasy football previews and Coaches Poll coverage

• December 2020: Contributed to second annual Rivalry Edition with The Lantern, writing two historical stories and one feature; spearheaded a social media campaign to promote the beat's work and encourage donations from alumni and fans

• March 2020 and 2021: Helped plan The Daily's third and fourth annual women's history month initiatives with feature stories on female athletes and coaches written by the women on the sports staff; helped with logistics and planning; collaborated with photographers, designers, web and audience engagmeent; spearheaded social media strategy to promote the initiative.