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SYRACUSE, N.Y. - If there’s one thing that
Mark Gaughan has learned as a veteran sports
journalist, it’s that it pays to be more than a one-
trick pony.
Born, raised and
educated in Western New York, Gaughan understands the value of being able to
adapt to any situation, sports or otherwise. Gaughan was introduced to the world of journalism while interning at the Buffalo News as a student at Buffalo State College. He then moved to Binghamton for his first full-time job in the field.
“At the time the Binghamton paper was kind of the AAA farm team of
the Buffalo News and they brought me back after a year to work at the Buffalo
News,” Gaughan said during a phone interview.
Despite being
the main college sports writer for the Buffalo News, Gaughan still writes on
the Buffalo Bills regularly during the season in addition to other Buffalo
sports stories. But he doesn’t see himself as strictly a sportswriter; instead,
Gaughan views himself as a journalist, period.
“I like being a
newspaper reporter,” Gaughan said. “I like to talking to people, meeting them,
engaging them, hearing their stories, and getting good stories out of them.”
One thing
Gaughan has noticed among young aspiring journalists is the tendency to limit
their options when it comes to subject matter.
Q: Alright. Can
you just talk about, uh, how you wound up in Buffalo and at the News?
A: Well, I’m a
Buffalo native, uh, grew up, was born and raised in Buffalo. And, uh, I went to
Buffalo State College. I was the editor of the student newspaper. And that
helped me get two internships. I did internships at the Buffalo News, uh, after
my junior year and my senior year. And then I worked at the Binghamton
newspaper for one year, um. At the time the Binghamton paper was kind of the
AAA farm team of the Buffalo News and they brought me back after a year to work
at the Buffalo News.
Q: Great. Uh,
you work on mostly the colleges, the Big Four locally, uh, so can you talk
about what you do on a typical day as far as what you write about, what you’re reporting?
A: Well it
depends on the season but, um, typically, uh, I’ll go out to, let’s say during
football season, I’ll go out to a UB football practice, uh, watch the practice
for two hours, um, and then interview some players and coaches. On a typical
day, that might be, practice might run from, say, two, or three to five. I’ll
interview players and coaches from five to six. Come back home, transcribe my
recordings from, say, six to seven. Write a story, write the story from seven
to nine, for whatever story, it’ll usually be a story notebook or several blog
items, um, so that would be a typical practice day. Um, then on game day, um,
it will be much of the same as a game day for the Bills, really, except it’s a
Saturday usually instead of a Sunday. Uh, game day I would probably, uh, get to
the stadium, uh, an hour and a half before the game. Do an hour and a half of
prep work, uh, sort of organizing my, uh, notes in a notebook so that I can
write faster during the game, so that I have all of the pertinent information
that I’m expecting to be sort of have at my fingertips rather than kind of
fumbling through media guides or opening 11 different screens on my laptop to
try to search through PDF files or background information. I like to compile
everything in a notebook before the game. Uh, so I’ll do prep work for an hour
and a half, watch the game, college games usually take, say, three and a half
hours. Then I’ll go down and interview players and coaches for both teams, come
back up, transcribe, and, uh, write the story. Or stories, it’s usually
numerous stories.
A: So I saw, um,
earlier you, uh, you wrote something on the Pegulas. Um, how often do you focus
on something outside of your specific area. How often do you do something like
that or just if something like that comes up?
A: Well, I would
say, I still write about, uh, I still write Bills stories on game days. So
during the Bills season, I’ve got colleges four days a week and the Bills one
day a week. Um, and, uh, in the college, in the summer, colleges are obviously,
you know, slow, there’s less to write about in colleges in the summer. So, I’ll
do various, I could cover fill-ins on a lot of different sports in the summer
time.
Q: Great. And
you mentioned you’ve written on the Bills, uh and the Sabres, do you have any
preference covering professional or college, um, or do you approach them the
same way?
A: Well, uh, I,
um, I like being a newspaper reporter. So I like to talking to people, uh,
meeting them, engaging them, hearing their stories, and getting good stories
out of them. Uh, everybody I think has interesting stories to tell, if you can
get them to share it. So, in that sense I would be happy covering high schools,
colleges, NFL, um, I could be, I think that, uh, I could be happy covering
police, fire, um, city hall, um, I covered the Bills for 25 years, so um, I
like the process of meeting people and then writing stories. So it doesn’t
really matter to me, um, what I’m covering per se. Um, I think some college
students kind of make a mistake if they’re too, uh, they restrict themselves
too much to sports. Um, I mean obviously going to the games for free is fun and
nice. But, um, if, uh, if you really like writing stories and being a
journalist, you, uh, will enjoy it whether you’re covering news stories or
sports stories.
Q: Uh-huh,
great. And just one more thing on a more personal note, uh, any prediction for
the Bills this year?
A: Well, I
think, um, you know, first of all predictions, everybody has them, they’re,
they don’t mean a whole lot, you know.
Q: Oh yeah.
A: But, uh, with
that being said, um, I’ll go, conventional wisdom would have the Bills winning
10 games and, uh, yeah I think they’ll win 10 games.
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