OK, as an ex-biketrials "journalist", I might have some pointers. If you're serious about becoming a professional journalist in the field of biketrials then there's a few things you ought to consider. Firstly, the field is extremely narrow - as far as I know, there's only one place in the world that pays for biketrials reporting, and that's MBUK in their hiphop section. In my opinion, there's only ever been one proper trials journalist, and that's Chris Ratcliff, who's been at it for over ten years now. As far as I know, there's a reasonable amount of competition for getting stuff published in Hiphop, not only with people from the trials world, but from full time MBUK staffers. Not only that, but the going rate for magazine work isn't going to be enough to support you. So, if you're a good enough writer and have adequate trade journalism skills (eg, can phone up a company and get good info out of them without pissing them off, and have the brain power to do proper product reviews, and own a little black book full of every useful contact in the entire sport) and you're lucky enough to be applying when they need someone, then you might get the hiphop gig as a source of some part time income.
If you want to be able to live off it, you've got to expand your horizons to cover other aspects of cycling - XC, DH, road, etc. If you're a general cycling journo then the range of jobs goes up from 1 to hundreds. The big websites pay for material, and there are plenty of magazines to publish stuff. You'd be looking at becoming a full staff member to get a regular salary (rather than a freelance). Unfortunately, there's massive competition for not many jobs, so unless you're a pretty damn good writer (or pretty damn lucky) you could find yourself stuck as a part time freelance writer for years, working very hard on stuff that only gets published some % of the time, and not getting very much money even when it is published. Even full time bike journalists do it out of love rather than for the money; it's certainly not a well paid profession.
So, chances are, it'll be very hard work for little reward.
On the other hand, if you just want to write stuff about biketrials, the best way is to put it up on a website. Section7 could sure do with some new blood, but there are many more out there. Or you could start your own.
