By JENNIFER ROBACK
News Editor
Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus welcome a new Sports Communication and Marketing B.A. degree for the Fall 2019 semester. The degree helps prepare students for careers related to the sports media field; and is one that is unique to New York City’s Metropolitan area.
The course description states that, “Students develop skills in areas such as sports writing and reporting; promotion of sports teams, events and products; performing as a play-by-play announcer or program host; and production of sports content for traditional, online and social media.” Along with developing those skills, students will also have access to the partnerships LIU has with places such as the Barclays Center, as well as the YES Network on cable.
“We have had some of these classes available to journalism students, and seeing as sports journalism has become more popular and a real growth area in jobs for people with journalistic training, we decided to carve it into a program that caters more specifically to the communication, public relations and marketing side of sports,” said Dr. Jennifer Rauch, a journalism professor at LIU.
“For a while we only had the B.A. in journalism, and now we have the B.A. in Sports Communication and Marketing and we anticipate a lot of students will do a double major in both and graduate with two degrees opening up more opportunities and become more flexible when students start applying for jobs,” said Rauch.
The sports communication program combines both journalism classes along with sports marketing classes. Aside from the required core classes, the Sports Communication and Marketing degree requires classes such as News Writing, News Reporting 1, a Journalism Internship, along with Introduction to Sport Management, Sports Marketing and Sociology of Sport.