Infostrada delivers a range of official event news services to major sports events like the Olympic and Paralympic Games, Pan American Games, world championships etc. Part of our services include official athlete biographies, which are provided to accredited media via the Games-time INFO system in the aim of improving overall press coverage of the event. Since 2002 our bios have been delivered to multiple summer and winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, Pan American Games, Rugby World Cups, Commonwealth Games, Asian Games, Youth Olympic Games, Asian Beach Games, and many more events. Our bios are also published all year round on numerous international sporting federation websites like FINA, IPC, FEI, ISU, FIE, ISU.
Basically we engage journalism students as volunteers to help us research and compile thousands of these detailed biographies every year, testing their research and writing skills. Students research and compile the bios from their own computers/homes, and can join at any time of the year either independently on their own time or through the university as part of a formal internship.
The main incentive for joining the Bio Research Project is the chance for students to be invited to work at major events with Infostrada as reporters, flash quoters, sub-editors and more. Infostrada delivers event news sevrices to a range of clients all year round, and supplementing the staff we always include a few of the brightest and best young students from our bio research project. It gives them a chance to experience working at a major sports event, performing the same work as seasoned media professionals, and in most cases they progress to paid work for us at subsequent events.
For the past 13-14 years we have primarily targeted universities in Australia and the UK, and in that time we have brought literally hundreds of students to work at dozens of major events, in both paid and volunteer roles. Most recently we engaged well over 50 students in the UK to work as part of the official Games News Service of the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.
In 2015 we are approaching US universities for the first time, ahead of our 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games projects, for which we will compile somewhere in the region of 25,000 detailed biographies over the next 12-15 months. For both the Olympics and Paralympics we will have event teams on-site in Rio, including a number of the best students chosen from the Bio Research Project.
We do understand that high costs of US university tuition means your students will likely be less inclined to engage in volunteer work compared to their Australian and UK counterparts. The bio research project is a critical part of our investment in young reporters who can eventually become key long-term members of our event operations, so we hope that a few may be interested despite its volunteer nature.
One of our current permanent paid bio team and event staff members, Alex Monnig, is a University of Missouri graduate who first joined as a volunteer bio researcher in 2010 while studying in Australia. Due to his excellent bio research skills, he was offered paid roles with Infostrada at the 2010 Youth Olympic Games in Singapore, the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, and he was head reporter at the Rotorua venue for the official Rugby News Service at 2011 Rugby World Cup. He has been a permanent paid bio researcher ever since, and most recently Alex was the senior specialist reporter for the cycling venue at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, where he supervised his own group of young student reporters. All of these events are a direct result of Alex joining the bio research project, and we have lots more students just like him.
We have a website dedicated to the bio project here http://infostradabioproject.com which explains in detail and includes testimonials from dozens of current and former student researchers.