Some students might attend their first year of college not knowing what career they want to pursue or what major will suit them best. Ryan Gaydos, on the other hand, is one of those students who knew what career to pursue since he was a child.
“Since second grade, I knew I wanted to become a sports writer and choosing the path of journalism is the easiest way to do that,” Gaydos, a junior majoring in journalism, said.
Although Gaydos will graduate from Kean University in May 2014, he has already gained much experience in journalism. He is a featured baseball columnist at RantSports.com and a site editor at TrueBlueTribune.com, a New York Giants blog. He is also the co-founder of The College Court, a college basketball driven blog.
Aside from being a columnist, a site editor and a co-founder, Gaydos is the sports editor for The Tower, Kean University’s student newspaper. His responsibilities as a sports editor include assigning stories to staff members and editing them.
“I contribute stories to the sports section as well,” Gaydos added.
Prior to Hurricane Sandy, Gaydos created The Keansburg Press, a blog whose purpose was to inform the residents of Keansburg, NJ, about the conditions of their town during the hurricane.
“My target audience was people that lived in the town or visited the town during the summer to go to the amusement park located in the town,” Gaydos said.
During the hurricane, The Keansburg Press received up to 35,000 hits in one day. However, a few days after the hurricane, the blog’s views ranged from 10,000 to 25,000 and later dropped drastically.
Gaydos submitted his Hurricane Sandy related stories, photographs and videos that he posted on his blog to nj.com and ABC7.
“Both websites re-tweeted and used the pictures and video on their websites,” Gaydos said.
Gaydos received more than 100 comments on The Keansburg Press. He said that people expressed their gratitude for his articles and for his coverage of the town.
Though Gaydos enjoyed covering Keansburg during Hurricane Sandy, he realized that hyper-local journalism isn’t his style.
“Although starting The Keansburg Press was fun and covering the town during the storm was a good service, I am not into the hyper-local journalism type of blogging as I thought I would have been,” Gaydos said.
As of today, Gaydos doesn’t have any future plans for his blog, but he does have plans for the upcoming spring semester. He will be interning at The Courier News covering high school sports.
After Gaydos graduates from Kean University, he plans to work as a sports writer at a newspaper company. In 10 years, he envisions himself working for ESPN, Fox Sports or NBC Sports.