The Spear
San Jose State University’s newest publication — The Spear — provides sports media coverage of the SJSU Spartans Div. I programs, campus club teams and local professional sports.
Our goal is to create informative and entertaining content covering several teams at multiple levels in a variety of athletic disciplines by combining conventional reporting with new-age graphics and engaging features.
Spear content has been borrowed and publicized by multiple professional organizations including The Washington Post and NBC Bay Area. Partnered with a sports journalism course through the Journalism and Mass Communications Department, The Spear provides the SJSU community with sports news and gives students an outlet to learn and hone skills in the sports media industry.
Our Story
The Spear was founded by students Kavin Mistry and Daniel Reedy who met as members of the Spartan Daily editorial staff at San Jose State. After two semesters of working on the award-winning Spartan Daily newspaper, the duo fused their passion for sports media with the JMC Department’s unresolved need for an athletics-focused publication.
After weeks of planning, the pair presented their objectives to the head of the department. Following her approval, they enlisted two of their successors at the Spartan Daily, Ryan Vermont and Sandeep Chandok, to join the new publication’s editorial staff.
The team published The Spear’s first article on its temporary website in late November of 2016. Professor Dona Nichols and the team rapidly developed a course over the winter break to accompany the publication. By January, with the assistance of Nichols, the full version of The Spear was launched.
Through the dedication and ambition of the editors, The Spear added various mediums to its programming and continues to pace the university’s sports coverage.
While we remain an unbiased, independent news organization, we have been given and continue to receive frequent praise from coaches, players and local media professionals for our creativity, thoroughness and exceptional standards.
The Elements
The flagship of The Spear is the publication’s social media accounts. Twitter utilization has spawned the most growth for the publication and The Spear receives recurrent acknowledgment from Spartan players and coaches via the online outlet. The highlight of our social media success was a shout out from hip-hop legend M.C. Hammer.
Many of The Spear’s best photos are displayed via Instagram, mainly shot by Mistry. As the publication advances, we will continue to boost our web presence with the operation of these outlets in addition to our growing use of Snapchat.
The Spear’s base is articles written by the team’s editors, class staff and recently-graduated contributors. This content is a blend of traditional game recaps and profiles with feature stories, columns and analysis pieces. Here, readers can find updates and long-form stories on men’s sports from football to hockey and women’s athletics from gymnastics to beach volleyball. We’ve reported on sporting events beyond San Jose, stretching our on-site coverage to Stockton, Santa Cruz and even Las Vegas for the men’s Mountain West Championship basketball tournament.
The largest project The Spear has undertaken has been a broadcast-style show. Captained by Rosa Jossa, the show and video content for The Spear improved over the inaugural semester and we anticipate further progress in the second half of our first year as we continue to acquire more resources, cultivate partnerships with other media organizations and gain a more experienced staff. As we look to expand this sector of our coverage, we recently added two new video editors to our team.
The final sector of The Spear is our magazine. We published eight magazines in our first semester, more than the rest of SJSU’s other publications combined. While we currently don’t have the budget for a print version, our magazine is available in PDF form online, including our first Platinum Edition which featured some of our top stories of the semester.
Message from the Editors
We greatly enjoy producing our content, gathering and reporting on news updates and having strong relationships with athletes, coaches and our audience. But above all else, we most enjoy being sports fans. Our love for the athletics environment, culture, essence and passion of the games is what drives us every day and inspired the creation of The Spear.
We hope you enjoy our work as much as we do creating it.