Sports Editor, Athens (Ga.) Banner-Herald

The Athens Banner-Herald is looking for a sports editor.

I don't have a formal job description yet as notice was just put in, but I'll give you the run-down because every day I wait to post this is one more day I'll be playing sports editor again.

— Three-person sports staff (SE, UGA beat writer, prep sports writer). We cover the University of Georgia, about 20 high schools and some community sports.

— The SE will do some page design. The less the better, but it'll have to be done. We're adaptive to the time of year, and this spring our departing SE was doing pages 1-4 nights a week depending on what was going on. We have 2.5 (soon to be more) people on the news desk who help out sports in part some nights and in full on others. Ideally, you'll be free to cover/coordinate football on Fridays and Saturdays in the fall, though we're still working on reshaping our desk operations after some significant changes a few months ago.

— You'll need some vision for the web and mobile (which are not the same things). We're a 20,000-circulation print paper, but we've got an outsized web presence of about a million unique visitors a month. We've won back-to-back APSE awards for multimedia in a class with much bigger dogs, and I'm looking for someone who carries the same vision for that kind of development. And nothing is off the table. If you can develop anything from a new way to write headlines to an entirely new platform, app or website, we'll work to make it happen. Because of this, any bit of web savvy and willingness to experiment is a major plus.

— You'll need to be organized. It's tough running a small department with big expectations and a beat like UGA across the street, so someone with the ability to think ahead, plan thoroughly and execute on goals will be needed to keep us an APSE top-10 daily section. We do an eight-page UGA football special section every Saturday in the fall, a big prep preview section and plenty of other four-to-eight page special sections along with enterprise work throughout the year.

— If you have an interest in becoming a bit of a coach, this will be a great place for you. About a year ago we started working with UGA's excellent sports journalism folks on developing an internship program, the Grady Sports Bureau, and at any given time we're working with half a dozen of their best students. It's a great program, and several of the students have already shown remarkable progress, graduated and found good jobs in the industry.

If you're interested, send me some clips of your writing, design, editing and/or multimedia work, your resume and a brief cover letter to christopher.c.white at onlineathens.com. Use "SPORTS EDITOR" in the subject line so I can easily search out and organize your emails among the 600 press releases I get every day.

 

Chris is good people, and they do good stuff here. The boundforboston approval.

 

Three-person staff...Amazing! Must be some real solid folks there to make it happen with three people.

 

Chris, you are da man. Are you staying on in a different capacity?

 

Yes, I'm here as director of audience, a position I've had for about five months. Rachel Bowers, our current SE, was ASE under me and has had the helm since November, when I started transitioning out of the department.

 

Jesus, three on staff. That being said, it's good to see Grady working with the B-H, which is something I always felt was an underused opportunity. Of course, in those days, the R&B was still a daily.