Hayters
Teamwork Sports Agency will announce details of a new award for young
sports journalists this summer as part of its 50th year celebrations.
Hayters,
founded by the late Reg Hayter in 1955, has grown from a oneman,
one-phone office, 114 steps above Fleet Street, to become one of the
country’s best-known and largest sports reporting agencies.
The Hayters academy has produced over 100 top sports reporters in all forms of media.
The
agency merged with Teamwork in 2002 and now has a 20-strong team in
London, the North and North East, as well as a network of stringers all
over the country and abroad.
It has recently joined forces with
sports photo agency Action Images to form a broadcasting wing, Sports
Broadcasting Company (SBC), serving television, radio and websites.
Current
executives Gerry Cox and Nick Callow, along with Reg’s son Peter, the
Mail on Sunday’s cricket correspondent, recently gathered employees
past and present at the Cheshire Cheese pub in Fleet Street to mark the
50th anniversary. They are planning a gala dinner to be held before the
Lord’s Test against Australia this summer.
The company will soon
unveil plans to introduce a young sportswriter award to honour Reg
Hayter’s name and help provide funds for a young journalist to get
started.
Cox, who is the third Hayters man to become chairman of
the Football Writers’ Association, said: “The award is the ideal way to
remember Reg and Hayters, which gave that first foot on the ladder to
so many sportswriters.
“There is nothing like Hayters for
producing such a vast array of talent, with just about every national
newspaper and broadcaster boasting at least one former Hayters man on
the sportsdesk.
It is absolutely unique in that respect.” Among
the company’s more prominent “graduates” in broadcasting are Richard
Keys and Gary Newbon of Sky Sports, BBC presenter Steve Rider, Match of
the Day editor Mark Demuth, ITV commentator Peter Drury and Radio Five
Live’s Alastair Yeomans.
In newspapers, Hayters has produced
leading writers such as Alan Lee, John Goodbody, Michael Calvin, Des
Kelly, Martin Samuel, Brian Glanville, Glenn Moore, Steve Tongue, John
Dillon, Michael Hart, Steve Stammers, John Ley, Alex Montgomery, Barry
Newcombe, Malcolm Folley and Dennis Signy OBE.
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