A conversation with an early career journalist on loving to write, serve and why there is a future in journalism

By Adam Drapcho and Julie Hart, Laconia Daily Sun

Listen to the full interview on The Granite Beat podcast and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts

This week, The Granite Beat hosts Adam Drapcho and Julie Hart speak with Eric Rynston Lobel, an early-career journalist who already has an impressive breadth of experience. Since graduating from Northwestern he has written for Sports Illustrated as well as the Concord Monitor. They discussed how he chooses his stories, sought his view on where the industry is heading, and heard what advice he would give an aspiring journalist.

This transcript has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

Adam Drapcho: Eric, what attracted you to journalism in general and how did you find yourself working for a newspaper?

Eric: I grew up in New York and Len Berman was the sports anchor for NBC 4, and he was having a book signing at the local bookstore. My mom took me to go and I got to meet him, and he gave me his email address. Mom had said you could do that when you get older, and that always stuck with me. It was always something –I had him back of my mind. I would always email him when I was younger talking about the Yankees or Giants or whatever I was interested in, and he would always get back to me. He was always really nice. I met him a few other times so when I got to high school, I was very fortunate that our high school had a radio station that I was able to get involved with and get some experience learning how this stuff works, and I got to do my own show. Once I got to Northwestern, I joined Northwestern Student Radio Station and got to broadcast games during my four years there. The thing I loved about our radio station was that in addition to broadcasting, we also did written stories and podcasts and talk shows and all that fun stuff. I got a good variety of experience there, but I knew that I wanted to write more than go into play by play broadcasting, just because I enjoyed writing more. After I finished up class, I started looking for writing opportunities and there weren't a lot unfortunately, but the Concord Monitor was one and I'm glad that they brought me on board, and it's been great to be around here.

Adam Drapcho: I enjoyed a story that you wrote recently about the shortage of officials for youth sports. It read more like a general news story than a sports news story. How did this story come to your attention, and why did you and your editors decide it was worth reporting?

Eric: We were sitting in the office talking, and I had been at a field hockey playoff game the night before in Exeter. I had mentioned that I was impressed by one of the referees because there was a lot of heckling going on from parents and not a ton from the teams, but a little bit. She was shutting them down right away, and good referees do that. Steve Leone, our publisher, had said, what if we did a story like the worst things that referees in the area have had said to them, or things that they deal with. That got my wheels turning and I reached out to a couple of officials in the area, contact info is on the New Hampshire Interscholastic Athletic Association website, and got to talk to them.

The story shifted away from that partially because they all told me that that's the stereotypical thing that people think about when you think about why people don't want to referee. It was still a good way of explaining that all these parents want their kids to play sports and get involved, which is great, but if you don't have referees, that's not going to happen. One of the baseball umpires I talked to, Jeff Kleiner, said that they've had JV games at the high school level where they only have one umpire because they don't have enough people to work. The story idea came up in our light period of the schedule because fall sports had ended, winter sports weren't going to start for another three or four weeks, so I was looking for stuff to write about.

Adam Drapcho: What sort of feedback have you had since that story was published?

Eric: A couple of the referees enjoyed the story. I think they always appreciate getting the word out, and this is a way to do that. I had one of them on my podcast with the Monitor Sports, Kyle Scofield, to talk more about his experiences. He's also a younger guy, I think he's only like 38 or 39 years old. You look at a lot of these officiating organizations, the average age is north of 50-55, so he's definitely one of the younger ones there that officiates. I wanted to get a younger voice on why he loves it and why he's gotten involved, and stuff like that has been helpful. I know that my editors enjoyed the story because they've had kids that have gone through the same thing where you hear parents heckling referees and stuff like that.

I think it's important to put a face on these folks that work really hard, and a lot of them say they don't do it as much for the money as they just enjoy being around the sports. Some of them are older and they can't play anymore. Others ended their athletic careers after high school and this is just a way for them to stay involved with the games that they like. I'm glad that we were able to get the story and that the officials were willing to talk about it.

Adam Drapcho: We've spoken to some veteran journalists who have expressed some concern over the trajectory of this industry. How do you see the journalism industry going? Specifically your community newspaper or the statewide newspaper, like the Monitor? Do you have a prediction as to what it's gonna look like 5, 10, 20 years from now?

Eric: I wish I did, but it comes back to two things in my mind. Why do these local papers exist? What purpose do they serve? And does the public find it valuable? If the public doesn't find it valuable, they're not going to subscribe. There's going to be no revenue for the papers to survive and they're going to close, which has happened in my mind. There is some appetite for local news. My family's from Long Island and our congressman elect, George Santos, has had all these stories in the New York Times and other outlets about all these things that he either misrepresented or lied about flat out. People were saying, how come nobody caught this before? I think there was one outlet that had written about it in some capacity, but nobody saw it. Stuff like that slips through the cracks and it reminds you that it is important to have local journalists who can cover this stuff, because it wasn't there. Now he got elected and you don't know if he would've gotten elected anyway. This is important information that he misrepresented. My point in bringing that up is that one of the whole premises of journalism is to hold people in power accountable.

If it's not there, then people are not going to be held as accountable as they were before. I think this podcast is trying to do that, to build trust with people in local areas and get them to understand why what we do is important. I like sports. That's why I got into this to begin with. I like to write. I know there's some people I went to school with who are very big on being esoteric about why they go into journalism and it's to be the saviors of democracy and all that stuff. I don't usually think about that as much because it's not very helpful to my day-to-day job. But it serves a purpose.

I think the medium in which it gets distributed will continue to evolve in the future. I don't know how viable print media will continue to be, but I think that's on local organizations to figure out how we continue to do our jobs in a way that people care. Does that mean more digital stuff? Does that mean podcast? Does that mean videos? More social media presence? There's a whole bunch of different avenues you can go. It's going to be up to local organizations to figure out what are people interested in paying us to do.

Julie Hart: Eric, I have just one question. What kind of advice would you give someone who's interested in journalism but might not know where to start to get their foot in the door?

Eric: If that person is in high school or college, I think looking at student media is always the first thing I tell people because that's where you can really get that good experience. I always say that I learned more from my work with the Northwestern Student Radio station than I did from any of my classes. That's not a knock on any of my professors or classes I took because they were all wonderful and I learned a lot from them, but you get that real practical experience of being on a deadline, talking to people right after a game, that you just can't replicate in a class setting. You also get to eventually rise up into leadership positions if you want, where you're an editor in chief, or I was sports director of our radio station. Then you get your foot in the door through internships, if you're sitting at home over the summer, you see if your local paper wants anyone. We have a high school student now at the Monitor who goes to one of the high schools we cover who will send in game recaps and stuff like that.

Networking is very important, too. Whether you intern somewhere, staying in touch with those people, developing relationships with the people you're at school with if you're doing this in high school or college, and then you go into the same field. Staying in touch with them, because everybody knows everybody in the journalism profession, it can never hurt to know a bunch of people.

Think about like why you want to do this, because it's great to do in college and cover your team and stuff like that. I moved to an area that I was very unfamiliar with and now I'm covering these high school teams. It's different for many reasons, but I think the reason I'm doing it is still the same, because I like writing and I like telling stories about the these athletes. Thinking about why you want to go into it is also important, and some people don't know right away. That's fine. I think those are all important things to think about.

This article is part of The Granite Beat, a project by The Laconia Daily Sun and The Granite State News Collaborative, of which Laconia is a partner. Each week Adam Drapcho and Julie Hart, will explore with local reporters how they got some of the most impactful stories in our state and why they matter. This project is being shared with partners in The Granite State News Collaborative.