Almost thirty years in the industry, including a year-long scholarship in the USA, spells as a freelance journalist and working for various newspapers covering all levels of Scottish football – Iain Collin has done it all.
Collin, 51, commenced his career in the industry in the mid-1990s after completing a journalism course at Edinburgh Napier University, the only Scottish university at the time able to offer a journalism course. He admits that when he first started, he would often try to deviate from the common practices that more experienced journalists would be so used to deploying.
“I remember when I first started, there were guys who were 30 or 40 years older than me”, Collin remembers. “And I won’t forget the looks they gave me when I began to ask questions [to interviewees] that were not football-related, to try and find a different angle to the story.”
For Collin, journalism was clearly beginning to take its first steps away from the more structured interviews by that point, and making strides towards the interview techniques that we see used by established journalists today, namely using a more informal tone, asking more questions related to the interviewee themselves and subsequently taking a genuine interest in what they have to say.
But does Collin believe that this is an effective technique?
“I think that it is good to show an interest in people”, he states. “I believe that taking care in how you speak to them and making them feel more comfortable is a good way to get them to talk more.”
Since showing promise as a young journalist with innovative techniques, Collin has held positions at the East Lothian Courier, where he was put on a placement while at Edinburgh Napier University, as well as spending nearly 20 years running his own freelance journalism agency, where he began attending press conferences and various matches across Scotland. During this time, he wrote articles for news sources including the Glasgow Times, the Daily Mail and the Edinburgh Evening News, using the quotes collected from press conferences, as well as supplying match reports.
Recently, he took the decision to take up a full-time position at the Dundee Courier, after relinquishing his role in charge of the freelance agency.
“All I wanted to be was a journalist, I didn’t want to run the business side of things”, Collin reflects. “But it’s just the way it worked out. I was working with two other people and running the admin side of things, while doing the tasks I need to do on a weekly basis. It felt like I was being held back at times.”
It is no secret that digital journalism has taken over and become immensely popular in the last 30 years, joining other industries in digitalising media, and become far more accessible in the process. The rise of social media and the accessibility of various media has paved the way for would-be journalists to develop skills by writing freely on online platforms, and gain feedback from viewers of various sites.
With the rise of digital media has also come the comparatively recent introduction of artificial intelligence (AI), which has taken the online world by storm. Collin admits that this has been somewhat helpful for journalists, himself included, in undertaking one notoriously tedious, but necessary, task in particular.
“Myself and other journalists have started using a website called TurboScribe, which is an online transcription services which uses AI”, Collin reveals.
“It saves a lot of time, it’s not perfect as you still have to go through and check that it’s transcribed everything as accurately as possible as mistakes can be made, as well as having to read through it again in case you’ve missed any important quotes, but it’s useful especially for post-match press conferences when you’re trying to be the first one to get the manager’s quotes online.
“You get three free transcriptions a day with the one I use, which is ideal as I rarely use more than that. There are occasions on a matchday where I need more, but journalists in the press room tend to share transcriptions around.”
The rise of media readily available on smartphones, tablets and computers has, in turn, led to the rapid decline in sales of printed newspapers, which Collin says were one of his main sources of inspiration for deciding that working in the industry was the career for him.
“I knew from an early age that I wanted to work in sport”, he says.
“And I decided that one way into doing that, because I couldn’t be a professional footballer, was to write about sport. And I was interested in newspapers at that point; they were always around the house.
“All my training and everything was done in newspapers, but nobody really buys newspapers anymore. Because of the way that media is consumed, the way journalists use techniques now is massively different to when I was starting out.
“That aside, I don’t think that it’s changed that much in terms of the actual news-gathering process and how you do that. You still transcribe quotes from people, and use them in articles in the same way as you would 20, 25, 30 years ago.”
Finally, what does Collin advise for up-and-coming journalists looking to put techniques, old and new, into practise?
“Learning by doing, that’s what I always say”, he smiles. “The more experienced you are, the easier it becomes but you can only get experienced by doing. Get out there and do as much as you can, and then, hopefully, things kind of fall into place the way that they did for me as well.”
