Coming from a sports-oriented family in which her dad played small college baseball before moving onto a coaching career and her mother’s father was also a baseball coach, Jenni Carlson was exposed to an array of sports from a young age. In high school, Jenni Carlson decided to experiment with marrying her love of sports with her newfound interest in journalism into a career. It worked.
Born in Clay Center, Kansas, a small town about 40 miles from Manhattan, Carlson earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism in May of 1997 from the University of Kansas. The day after graduation, she began her job as a high school sports columnist for the Kansas City Star. In August of 1999, she was hired by the Oklahoman and has worked there ever since as a sports columnist.
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| Jenni Carlson, sports columnist for the Oklahoman, poses in the studio located in the newspaper's building. PHOTO: Chelsey Kraft |
Carlson says that despite being a woman in a journalist field that is characteristically male-dominated, she has never felt any overwhelming negativity or sexism. She also says she has had constant support from the people she has needed on her side, such as her coworkers, bosses and sources. Also, she understands that her specific job as a columnist may receive negative attention, whether she is a man or a woman.
“As a columnist there are going to be people that disagree whether I am a woman, man, it doesn’t matter. Part of being a columnist is saying things and eliciting emotion that may not be comfortable. Some of the emotion may be very negative, very angry,” Carlson says.
Although Carlson’s background is as a writer, she has had to learn new skills that fit into the strides the Oklahoman has taken in order to fit into the new media shaped by recent advances in technology. Aside from her column, Carlson also writes a blog. Once a week, she and other columnists and reporters chat with readers online, and they also appear in videos for the newspaper’s website, www.newsok.com. Facebook and Twitter are both also utilized by Carlson because the two can create some exposure of the Oklahoman to a generation that is computer-oriented. She also uses the social media outlets in an attempt to show her personality and try to build a connection with readers because she believes it is important to be more than just a flat, two-dimensional face in a newspaper.
Carlson says that despite the change going on, she and her colleagues are still focused on the basics of journalism.
“What we do is still rooted in what we have always done, which is build sources, break news, tell stories, entertain, inform, all those sorts of things that newspapers were always meant to do…Those are things that we are going to do whether it’s now or ten years ago or ten years from now or ten minutes from now,” Carlson says.
For aspiring journalists, Carlson offers advice including to possess a willingness to work hard and to take any story that may come one’s way and make the most of it. Also, she suggests that journalism students do their best to become as well rounded as possible since multimedia is becoming predominant in the industry. She says writers now have to think about if there is a video element, multimedia element, web link or blog, among other aspects, that could become part of a story.
“Thinking about those things has made me a better storyteller. It has made me think of things more visually…You tend to think a little more broadly than you used to if it was just words on a page,” Carlson said.
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