As you know, the Philadelphia Inquirer has gone through a total transformation over the last few years, and in the sports department there’s another new hire:

According to DiAmore’s Linkedin page, she’s a 2022 Temple graduate and has freelanced for the Inquirer for the last 10 months.

This is interesting from a macro-level standpoint, because as recently as a few years ago it was uber-rare to see someone go straight from college to a top-five media market, be it print, TV, etc. The path for most writers typically involved working for some shit rag in the middle of nowhere for a few years, and then maybe a real newspaper would finally look at your resume, but with the changes we’ve seen in the journalism business recently, it’s easier than ever to skip that step and go right to a legacy media outlet in a top-10 market.

The Inquirer’s coverage model really evolved following the departure of high school and college guys like Phil Anastasia, Marc Narducci, and Rick O’Brien, among others. They used to have veteran full timers doing Temple, Villanova, St. Joe’s Prep, and stuff like that, but when the mass buyout/exodus took place after the employee revolt, the sports department turned to students and much younger writers to cover high school and college sports. I could be wrong, but I don’t think they had a single full timer doing strictly high school or college post-exodus, and instead used an array of freelancers and college kids. That, in turn, created a path for them to eventually go full time with the Inky, which is pretty sick. Now these kids don’t have to slave away at the Daily Local or whatever.