Sports desk editor -- Easton, Pa.

Unless you are the rah-rah type, this should have zero impact on your career.

 

You don't care whether people care about what you write? Isn't that one of the major reasons people want to cover pro and major college sports than youth and high schools -- because people are a lot more likely to pay attention to your stories?

 

Actually, no. I care about satisfying my need to do good work. I assume that if I do a good job, people will enjoy it. But I don't think we've been successful as an industry in predicting what people will enjoy.

 

At some level that's true, but there's a reason the prestige beats are the ones with the most reader interest. If you're covering consistent state champions/contenders, your copy will be treated with more esteem by the readers than it would if you're covering 3-6 Piss River and 2-7 Short Bus Central in a game with 200 people in attendance.

 

Amen!

 

If you base your self-esteem on what readers think about your assignments or how it is played, this is not going to be a very happy career overall.

 

All well and good, but I never said that a) a writer SHOULD measure their self-esteem based on reader interest or b) that good high school sports should be a reason in itself to take a job. What I'm saying is a) in an industry where quantifiable measurements are rare and usually off-kilter anyway, reader interest in your product is one of the more solid ones. Would you rather write for thousands, or for 14 relatives of the feature star? and b) while the quality of sports shouldn't have an impact on whether you take the job, don't you want to know how seriously the community and paper take them?

 

And my original point was that when you apply for a better job, the quality of the preps you covered means nada. You are a preps writer, and either you can write and report or you can't. They will not care that your clip is from the state finals.

 

Like everything else, Frank, it's not a black/white answer.

Redesign gurus tend to want total submission to their game plan. When it was suggested that she didn't want us to write heads except in 6-point increments -- 24, 30, 36, 42 -- we said, "whoa there." And when she wanted white space to the extent of losing copy, we said, "whoa there."

It is, after all, what DP would have done.

 

Understood. I don't think there has been a redesign inflicted on me that I've totally loved. But ... you pay huge bucks to have it done by an outsider, only to have it undone by insiders in a matter of months.

Strange, though. For decades we managed to write heds to specs, now it's like a huge imposition to ask someone not to kick down a 48 to a 44.

 

No leeway whatsoever, not even a point or two either way? (I'm not being snarky, I really don't know.)

 

Having good teams to cover is a job perk. In addition to covering events on a "bigger stage", you'll also be doing different types of stories: recruiting stories, tournament stories, perhaps stories on the kid who makes the Junior National Team or competes for a national championship. You'll get to do more as a writer than if you cover Short Bus Central. There's nothing wrong with trying to sell a potential employee on that.