ESPN college sites/hiring

Did someone grab the John Carroll gig yet?

 

There is a Michigan one launching shortly. They've hired Mike Rothstein from AnnArbor.com, Chantel Jennings, who is a fresh graduate who wrote for the Michigan Daily, and Tom Van Haaren from MGoBlog.

It's bizarre to criticize these jobs as dead-ends in this environment.

 

The environment is bad. The openings mean jobs. The jobs offer nothing beyond what they're saying. That's all I'm saying.

 

Fortunate for you Mike that you can worry about that right now. Some people are just trying to eat, pay their mortgages, keep their kids in good schools and pay for healthcare. Trust you can work out all the other details later. Here is what I would do if ESPN hired me for one of those jobs: I would work my ass off, break stories, develop sources and write enterprising features on players, coaches, recruits to make myself attractive to someone else. That way ESPN might show me some love and promote my ass. I would love to see some unemployed fool in the economic climate turn down one of these jobs because it's a dead-end. I would personally smack his ass...LMAO!

 

ESPN's Oklahoma site, Sooner Nation, has launched. Not sure how long it has been up, but I noticed it this morning. It joins USC (WeAreSC) and Texas (HornsNation) on the slow-growing network.

Not sure who's next. We know Michigan's in the works, same with Georgia.

 

I didn't notice until today, but the Michigan site launched, evidently over the weekend. We know Georgia is in the works. Anybody know of others that are getting ready to launch?

 

I have a few friends who are ESPN bloggers for college and the NFL. Consensus is that while you have to be on the ball about what's going on across your conference, these guys do not have to do 95 percent of the grunt work that newspaper beat writers have to do.

Can you imagine being a college or pro beat writer without having to chase down agents or GMs or trying to find out which players the team worked out that week. Most of us have spent countless hours trying to find out this kind of stuff and with rare exception, if you work for one of the ESPN sites, whether it's ESPN.com or write for one of the zillion of satellite radio sites or one of these new places, you can basically focus on what really matters on the beat. You're working your ass off, but you're not spending a day finding out who is going to be on the practice squad or which players were brought in to work out to audition to be the 53rd guy on the roster.

 

Or filling out the massive gameday package for print that doesn't even go online. Or being asked to write 40-inch features once a week while producing a story and a notebook every day for print anyway.

 

When I covered the NFL, I would have to produce between 25-30 pieces of copy (not all stories mind you...) a week. We had this enormous preview section that we had to fill each week and they needed analysis of both rosters, and 12-14 inch matchups of the QBs, RBs, WR/TR, OL, DL, DB, LB, special teams and coaches. It would take forever to do and nobody ever read it. Then I'd have to pick every game and that was usually 35 inches. Again, not hard stuff to write, but just time consuming.

I did the Sunday feature most weeks and then there was the day-to-day stuff... I loved it, but it was an insane amount of work. The two other guys I worked with did every bit as much as I did as well. Between the three of us and two columnists there were easily 80+ stories/pieces of copy in most weeks.

The ESPN guys don't have to any of the mindless time-consuming crap that just about every other beat writer has to do.

 

OK, so is there a contact or central website for this sort of thing?

 

Georgia site has launched.

http://espn.go.com/colleges/georgia/index

Like last weekend, I'm probably a day or two late with this observation, but as many of you can imagine, I become so busy on weekends during football seasons I don't really come up from breath until Tuesday, if that.

 

What's the guess on salaries for some of these team-specific sites?

It sounds like they are hiring established beat writers, so it certainly can't be that bad. That can be bad news for the newspaper industry if ESPN basically starts staffing every BCS beat and outspending college town and local metro newspapers for talent.