For Tri-C Media Adjunct, Covering the World Cup is #Goals

While the rest of the world is watching the World Cup, Alisson Toro-Lagos is working. As a Spanish-language live blogger for USA Today, she is writing in real time about what she sees on TV.

She tries to find the words to convey vivid pictures of what's happening on the pitch. She writes about what music is playing, what colors she sees. She has come up with countless ways to describe kicking a ball.

Her first tournament assignment was the USMNT opener against Paraguay.

"I did the entire live blog by myself. I wrote it in Spanish. I wrote about what happened at the opening ceremony and then all the game highlights throughout. It was a lot. That was the first time I watched a soccer game when it went by really fast," she said.

Lagos, 26, is a breaking news reporter for the Akron Beacon Journal. She is freelancing as a sportswriter and video personality covering the World Cup for USA Today, and this fall, she will teach her first media course as an adjunct faculty member at Cuyahoga Community College (Tri-C^®).

Born in Chile, her futbal knowledge is a birthright, but she has also live-blogged Browns, Guardians and Cavaliers games.

She moved to the United States in 2004, becoming a U.S. citizen in 2024. Her mother worked in the horse racing industry, which meant that Lagos followed the races around the country as a kid.

She attended about nine different schools growing up, she said. Among her favorite cities was Miami, Florida, which is where she planted herself to start college.

Lagos earned her bachelor's degree in television and emerging media at Barry University in Miami. She earned master's degrees in business administration and executive business and sports administration while beginning her career as a journalist.

Her first job was working as a producer at Channel 5 in Cleveland. She would earn an Emmy nomination there before moving to breaking news and sports at the Beacon Journal.

Looking for "something to stimulate her brain a little bit," Lagos enrolled in the criminal justice program at Tri-C in 2023. (She had been pursuing a double major at Barry. In addition to her media degree, she was pre-law. She dropped the pre-law track but never lost interest in the field.) She completed the degree in 2025.

Her course this fall will cover the basics of journalism.

"I want to break it down to students — how to write a story, the difference between a feature and a column, how to talk to people," she said.

Her journalism philosophy centers on listening.

"Sometimes it's best to just listen to people. Remain neutral and just try to report on the facts. That's really all you can do. An opinion is just an opinion."

This includes covering the World Cup, even though as a sports fan, she has her favorites.

"We have to be unbiased," Lagos said. "If we put too much emphasis on one team, it'll show. I do my best to keep it very neutral."

Contact Jarrod Zickefoose at jarrod.zickefoose@tri-c.edu

July 07, 2026