Some Advice to Aspiring Golf Media

Every week or two, I’ll get a DM or email from someone aspiring to break into the golf media world. And instead of responding to every individual message, I finally broke down and wrote out some thoughts I have on this.

I should note that these thoughts are emblematic of my experience and perhaps are not representative of everyone’s experience. Regardless, I hope they are helpful, and I’m happy to answer any follow ups anyone has at kyle at normal sport dot com.

1. Whatever your craft is, do it with consistency: If you write a weekly newsletter, do it every week. If you publish five tweets a day, do five tweets every day. If you make two YouTube shows every month, make two YouTube shows every month.

That's very simple and almost sounds like silly and rudimentary advice, but it's the most foundational thing I can think of to break into the industry.

When you're consistent, you build both trust with an audience and a habit for yourself that's necessary to thrive in the golf media (or any media) space. You are, as Steven Pressfield wonderfully notes in his book Turning Pro — learning to move away from being an amateur into the space of being a professional.

A personal example: I started my career blogging about Oklahoma State football and basketball (an insane sentence in and of itself). When I started that endeavor, I wrote every day for three months with no audience. I wrote every day until I had 100 blog posts to launch the website with.

This 1. Helped me develop the muscle of doing the thing every day, 2. Allowed me to figure out if it was even something I wanted to do and 3. Indicated to my future audience that I was a professional who was going to show up for them every single day.

2. Find a niche and become an expert in it: My path to covering golf at CBS Sports was weird and not traditional. Through that OSU blog I mentioned above, I became an expert in the arena of college football and hoops, built up a following and used that as my resume when the CBS Sports opened up.

OSU didn't necessarily lead me directly to golf, but it did lead me to proving that I could run a website on my own and write knowledgeably about sports. Niches get noticed, especially when you display a level of expertise and agency over one that previously did not have an expert. Once you gain attention, your world opens up. There are a lot of opportunities to do different things.

Your niche might be (and probably should be) incredibly specific. Maybe it's golf course architecture in northwest Ohio or MAC women's golf or whatever. It can be anything at all as long as you're all in on it.

No Laying Up is a good example of this. They originally appealed to a tiny audience of golf fans that understood what something called Tour Sauce was and then built out from there. It started as a text thread! Now, it’s a bustling multi-million dollar media enterprise.

In my experience, it's better to have 100 fans that worship you than 10,000 fans that kinda sorta like you. It’s nearly impossible for your niche to be too small.

3. Show genuine interest in the work of people you want to emulate: If you’re not an entrepreneur, getting into the industry usually requires knowing somebody. If you are an entrepreneur, this can still be good advice but I wouldn’t say it’s paramount.

People can always see through you when you’re simply trying to leverage their position for the sake of your own career. But if you show authentic curiosity regarding what they do and how they creat, that's really compelling and attractive.

The only reason I was hired at CBS Sports was because I -- providentially, I believe -- met some of the right people. In my case, Jonathan Wall and David Ubben. I was not very good at reaching out to people, and I kind of stumbled around in that space, but it somehow worked out.

If you're legitimately asking people how they do what they do and learning and growing and observing as you go along, I think that works. Being on the other side of it now, I know it feels good to pass on things I have learned to people who will do more with them than I have.

So meet all of the people. Find the ones you connect, ask good questions and listen a lot. It will go further than it feels like it should.