Colleges Reporter, The Lakeland (Fla) Ledger

From the NYT Company careers site:

The Ledger is seeking a F/T Sports Reporter covering local and statewide colleges. Responsibilities will include:

* Covering games, writing features and maintaining a daily blog.
* Maintaining contact with coaches, players and others at all local and statewide schools.
* Maintaining accurate schedules of all upcoming athletic events and working with Assistant Managing Editor over Sports to arrange coverage of games.
* Ideal candidates will have experience in all aspects of multimedia journalism, with particular emphasis on existing and emerging digital platforms. A college degree is required.

There's an online application you can fill out by going through the site. Here's the link to the careers home page: http://www.nytco.com/careers/. The paper recently filled its Prep Sports Editor position with Solange Reyner, who had worked in the South Florida area. This opening was created by the departure of Tom Zebold, who is going to work for the USF athletics department's new website as its main writer.

 

Is this for USF?

 

Unless I'm mistaken, Lakeland historically hasn't done much as far as college beat writers.

Plus it's a strange market geographically, with a lot of split loyalties among Florida teams and I'm sure a huge percentage of transplants who have no affiliation with any state university.

I've always like the paper when I used to see it back in the day.

 

I can't imagine they would cover UF since the Gainesville paper is also in the NYT chain. USF and UCF are the only ones that make any sense.

 

Florida Southern is in Lakeland.

 

I think this is Tom Zebold's job. He left to work for USF as a staff writer.

 

Referring to the original post:

 

I heard someone used to have this job but then got another job. Any truth to this?

 

And I thought my inside sources were good . . .

Mizzou, there is some UF coverage in this from what I understand. People in Florida can't seem to get enough Gators stuff, and Lakeland is a big Gators hotbed. Not sure how much travel there would be to FSU and Miami, but I'm pretty sure USF and UCF will be big parts. And like someone mentioned, you have local colleges like Florida Southern, Southeastern University, Webber International, etc. Enough to keep someone busy.

 

Isn't this Tom Zebold's old job?

 

Seriously?

 

The blue text means it's urgently serious, yes.