Jim Rosenthal, How to stay at the top of the broadcasting game – Media Festival

I booked this event for the media festival as I knew it would be interesting. Jim Rosenthal has a huge amount of experience and has done a lot during his broadcasting career including covering formula one races and many other sports events and I wanted to hear about his experiences and gain some advice which I could use myself.

During this event, Rosenthal was interviewed by students Alex and Toby from the University who asked him a range of questions and his answers were intriguing.

He started off by explaining how his career started, saying that he started at the bottom and built his way up. At school, he was on the tennis team and they got to the final match of a competition and won. From here, he wrote an article about it and had it published in his local paper. For him, this was exciting and he started trying to ‘get his foot in the door’ and began to build up his career.

One of Rosenthal’s mottos; ‘really have a go and see where it takes you’ urged him to carry on and succeed in making his way up in his career, telling us about how broadcasting gives him joy and a buzz.

Never planning ahead is also advice which Rosenthal gave because he says planning ahead doesn’t always end well. I found this interesting and personally now, I might start taking opportunities more and see where they take me rather than planning ahead and waiting for those things to happen.

Social media was slightly touched upon during the event and Rosenthal said “it didn’t exist in the bulk of my career.” He made his way to the top of the broadcasting game the ‘old-fashioned way’, without social media and online presence.

Whether social media is a good thing or a bad thing is a big debate and Rosenthal mentioned how he was told on one occasion that he had a number of nasty comments written about him on social media, but he never paid attention to any of it.

He went on to tell us about how you need self-confidence to do what he does as it’s a fun job, but it isn’t always easy. There can be early mornings and lots of travelling, but he concluded that the job is definitely rewarding.

In 2003, Rosenthal covered the rugby world cup final and revealed that this was his proudest moment in his career. Millions of people watched this, and I wondered how he stayed calm and this was answered later on in the talk when he discussed that one day someone had given him the advice; “treat the camera like it’s your friend.” I personally found this really helpful as talking to a camera knowing that people are or will be watching is a strange situation, so this is advice I’ll be taking on board throughout university and in the future.

I think the main thing that I’ll take away from this event is that you have to keep trying and work hard to achieve what you want to achieve. Success doesn’t just come over night. Finding out that his son played Jonny on Friday Night Dinner also intrigued me as I didn’t know that before and love that show. I really enjoyed this event, and hearing everything Rosenthal had to say was an honor.

This article was also uploaded to Universal (The University of Gloucestershires news outlet). - https://www.uoguniversal.com/general/jim-rosenthal-how-to-stay-at-the-top-of-the-broadcasting-game-media-festival/ and this version was edited by Phoebe Nott.