Every year, graduates from the College of Letters & Science enter the workforce and begin to contribute thousands of dollars to their local, state, and national economies. They bring the skills and knowledge they gained at UW-Milwaukee to their jobs, along with their ambitions and fresh perspectives.
In this article series, we highlight some of the recent Letters & Science alumni who have found fulfilling roles in their chosen fields.
Name: Beckett Callan
Graduation Year: 2023
Major: Journalism, Advertising, & Media Studies (JAMS)
Job: Assistant sports editor at the Waukesha Freeman
Beckett Callan grew up watching sports with his family. Whether it was the Brewers, the Packers, or the Bucks, he had a habit of pointing out penalties or interesting plays on the screen seconds before the broadcaster would echo his observation.
“My mom always said, ‘You should do something like that (for a career). And I was like, yeah, whatever,” Callan joked. “As I got older, I thought, hold on a second. Maybe I should do something about that. So that’s where my interest in sports journalism first started.”
UW-Milwaukee is a great school for someone interested in journalism. Callan chose UWM for the urban environment and the strength of its JAMS program. His favorite class was an advanced reporting course taught by JAMS Senior Teaching Faculty Jessica McBride. Each year, with the help of generous grant funding, McBride leads her students on a multi-day research trip to perform a deep investigative dive into a pressing current event. One year, Callan and his classmates covered the blockades erected by the Lac du Flambeau tribe in a dispute over road easements. On another trip, they explored the challenges facing New England’s fishing industry.
Callan didn’t have any internships during his time at UWM, but those courses gave him the experience he needed to land a job as the assistant sports editor at the Waukesha Freeman soon after graduation. It didn’t hurt that he had a bit of sports writing experience covering the Brewers as a freelancer and the Packers for Heavy.com, either. The Freeman is a local daily paper covering the communities in Waukesha County, Wisconsin. Incidentally, McBride is a former writer, columnist, and freelancer for the Waukesha Freeman.
Journalism comes in many flavors – broadcast, multimedia, digital – but Callan has always gravitated toward print. Working at the Freeman has been a great fit. There was a bit of a learning curve, especially since his beat covers the gamut of high school sports, from tennis to lacrosse to football. Callan attends his assigned matches each evening and then writes up the report for the next edition of the paper.
If he had to choose, his favorite sport to cover would be hockey.
“That one’s just fun because it’s kids going 100 miles an hour, bashing each other into the ice, and then they get off the ice and they’re the happiest, nicest kids alive, who don’t seem like they could hurt a fly,” Callan said with a laugh.
He still has opportunities to write the human-interest stories that he learned to craft in his UWM classes, including longer features about athletes or coaches. Those have proven to be some of his favorite articles that he’s written.
“I did one about a couple of old-timers who are getting inducted into different Wisconsin Halls of Fame. I think one was the athletic directors and the referee Hall of Fame,” Callan said. “Athletic directors and referees don’t really ever get recognition, you know. So, talking to them, hearing responses from their spouses who had to put up with them being gone for three, four nights a week for the last 40 years – that one I was pretty proud of. I hope I did them justice.”
That’s one of the best things about working at a local paper, he added – he gets to highlight members of the community who would be overlooked by larger news outlets. Local, independent journalism is a crucial part of any municipality, even if the industry is facing headwinds. Callan is excited to be part of the local news tradition in a job that he enjoys.
“(This news) just doesn’t get covered anywhere else,” he explained. “It’s really the only place that people can learn about what’s going on in their community. … It’s stories about people near and dear to you.”
By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science