Best state to live in as a sports reporter?

As a stress factor. Depends on your viewpoint, I guess. Some folks would like the competition, and that's good to light a fire under you. But to me, it seems the sheer amount of people covering those teams in say, New York, Philly, Boston or Washington has got to make it tougher to do the job. It's harder to stand out.

 

And, you can breath all the noxious air you want.

 

That's cool. Philadelphia disowns most of the rest of Pennsyltucky, too.

 

not if you're good

for me, being in a very competitive market is the life blood of the job

some may disagree

 

I have previously written on this board that southern California is a particularly bad place to be a sports writer. I said that because of the high costs of living, few daily newspapers (I'm counting the Singleton-owned papers as one outfit because they use the same coverage), and lack of opportunity.

Here are the factors I would use:

1. Cost of Living. I am from New Jersey and I loved the sports scene. But it is very difficult to make ends meet on a writer's salary. If you can't make a decent living, nothing else matters.

2. Opportunity. The more daily newspapers there are, the more chances you have.

3. Availability of college sports to cover. I have to disagree with E Street Joe (I generally like his posts) because in New Jersey and the New York area, there really isn't much college football around. If you take the state of New Jersey and New York City and environment, Rutgers is the only real competitive Division 1-A team. Five years ago, you couldn't have even made that statement. In fact, it is only recently Rutgers could be considered big-time - they talked like they were big-time and tried to act like it, but I don't think anybody in New Jersey took them seriously as a big-time power from 1970 to 1992.

I make that point because that means there is little opportunity to cover a big college football beat in New Jersey. There is a heckuva lot more passion about college basketball in New Jersey, but you don't have opportunities to cover college football very much in New Jersey, and with only one team, that would mean there would be less interest in covering Rutgers.

4. Availabilty of Professional Sports Teams. Not as important for employment as college teams, because there are only around 30 teams in each professional sport. Atlanta and Phoenix are cities with four pro sports teams. However, going to Factor Number 2, there would seem to be fewer newspapers in the Phoenix area because there aren't that many large cities outside of there in the state - Tuscon would be the only one. Atlanta seems to have more suburbs hence more opportunity.

I don't think you can categorize things as a state. For instance, in Texas, there is Dallas, Houston, El Paso, and Lubbock... all are totally different. If you did a good job in Lubbock and El Paso and could get a better position, would it matter if it was in Houston or Phoenix or Denver?

 

Going by Gold's post -- Ohio wins!

 

Would Ohio be better than Michigan? I don't know. Michigan had two major college Big Ten teams, although Ohio has a number of secondary D-1 football teams (Cincy) Michigan had a four-sport pro city, although Ohio has three cities with major league pro sports teams. Ohio might have more different daily newspapers, so that might be a plus for the Buckeye State. Interesting.

 

Michigan would be a horrible place to work. That state relies on the car industry and is in a horrible economic state right now (worse than elsewhere)

 

Uh lived there 4 1/2 years, so I'll give that a NOT!!

 

Worst air in the US is in southern California. If you don't believe me, ask the American Lung Association.

 

Comfortably numb works for me ...

 

I am building an agate page now and I almost spit my pepsi across the room when I read that