Unit 2 Reflection

When discussing ESPN’s use of technology to expand it’s horizons, I am aiming this piece at anyone who is your average sports fan.  At some instances I made direct references to my audience.  In many instances, I referred to the audience as fans of ESPN.  At one point I mentioned, “Now fans can feel as if they are much closer to the players and can grasp a better understanding of how athletes are physical specimens.”  Although I target the fans throughout the paper, I also try to expand horizons at some points.  

Right now is the age of technology and social media.  We can see changes in the way were living and collected new information every year and we have to tweak our likes slightly in order to keep up with it.  For a large company like ESPN, those changes and adaptations are a little bit more drastic.  There are some articles that you can find on the internet about how ESPN is doing so but I feel like there should be a lot more information available.  More research needs to be done on large businesses, such as ESPN, on how they are handling and adapting to technology in order to stay relevant in this new age.  When ESPN was first starting up, they had one TV channel that was always delivering sports news.  Over the years, it is crazy to see how it has been molded by demand from the market.  This demand is directly correlated to technology.  If we look at the company now, there are five tv channels, a website where you can stream games and highlights, countless smartphone applications, and new technologies bringing the fan closer to the games and players.  No one could have ever imagined ESPN would become what it is today—and no one knows what ESPN will look like in a few years or even months.   

I believe that I was very successful with engaging my audience in my pitch homework assignment.  I tweeted my pitch with a link to my blog so that my followers could take a look and see if they would be interested in how technology allows ESPN to find, reach, and expand their audience in a way that best interests the company and it's viewers.  Amazingly, a few of my friends read through my work and gave me awesome feedback.  Ideas began to flow through my head about what examples I could use to support my argument.  My one friend reminded me about Statcast and Sport Science.  

I feel as if there were a few very valuable aspects that can be taken away from this unit.  The first was how to correctly write a pitch.  The one example we looked at in class was very helpful when thinking of a pitch or thesis.  My originally thesis was boring and did not grab a person’s attention.  When we analyzed the different aspects that go into a pitch from the website in class, I realized that I would have to reword and reorganize my pitch in order to make for a strong thesis. The website had nine steps to create a pitch.  In their example, they used a movie.  These nine steps included: draft the initial short pitch, identify possible genres, identify themes, identify structural elements, brainstorm comparisons, build a table and hold comparisons, fill in the table, sort the table and look for patterns, and to improve your pitch.  I believe these nine steps can be very helpful in the future when I am trying to write a thesis in undergraduate school or hopefully beyond in graduate school.  

I believe that this project gave me other valuable tools that I can use in the future, especially graduate school.  Peer editing was something that I never actually took the time to do.  This class really reintroduced me to this concept and I hope that I can continue to bounce ideas off my peers in the future.  Not only can they find errors in your writing that are crucial corrections, but they can also provide brainstorming that you did not think of at first.  During next level writing, every little correction is very important.  All in all, I feel that these first two units will be carried with me wherever I go in life.  This can be important in my future profession as well.  It goes past just writing skills and includes communication skills.  Both have improved drastically and I can not wait to see what Unit three can add to my arsenal.