John McGuirk currently works at LHS, but his other job is what brought him to Ms. Duffy’s Journalism class.
McGuirk writes for the New England Baseball Journal, and he has been with the company for about 4 years now. He mainly covers college baseball and prep school baseball.
McGuirk had gotten into writing and journalism when he was in college at Temple University in Philadelphia.
He explained to the class one of his first jobs in journalism was a crime scene, and he witnessed a dead body and then had to write about it.
After he did crime journalism, he switched to sports writing and was originally doing Leominster, Fitchburg sports. Then he left and got a job working at the Worcester Telegram doing the same type of stuff, then he went to the Boston Globe, and then he went to ESPN until ESPN removed their High School coverage.
McGuirk now writes for the New England Baseball Journal and he currently has 76 schools that he has to watch and write about. There is a lot of communication between him and all the schools and their athletic trainers.
One thing Mr. McGuirk said a couple of times is that “media has changed a lot within the last 15 years,” and he expressed concern over the increase in biased reporting on topics and how it influences the viewers into possibly believing something that may not be true.
He called on the class to be aware and fact check.
He also encouraged the class to give the idea of having Journalism as a career a real try.
“Have an idea before you start writing” said McGuirk. “Knowing what you are writing about before makes it easier for you to understand the topic. This also helps with knowing what questions to ask, if people have further questions, to make sure they are getting all the information needed.”
McGuirk is the second in a series of guest speakers to visit Journalism Class. Earlier the class was visited by LTV Director Scott Kurland who discussed volunteer opportunities with the Leominster community television.
