Sports Editor - Clayton, Ga.

JournalismJobs.com - Job Listing - Sports Editor

Description:
The Clayton Tribune, an award-winning weekly newspaper in the heart of the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of North Georgia, has an immediate opening for a sports editor. Our local high school boasts a first-class athletics program that consistently competes for top honors in a variety of sports. You’ll write everything from game stories to sports features. Pagination and photography skills required. You will also paginate other sections of the paper as needed. The Clayton Tribune has been one of Georgia’s most honored weekly newspapers the past several years in state, regional and national editorial contests. We’re about an hour south of Asheville, 90 minutes north of Atlanta, and our community features lakes, rivers, mountains and a portion of the Appalachian Trail that make it an outdoors lover’s paradise. We offer health insurance and career opportunities within our group of newspapers in Georgia, North Carolina and Florida. Please email resumes and clips to Publisher Wayne Knuckles at wknuckles@theclaytontribune.com. No phone calls, please.

 

Pros:

Beautiful part of the country. Rabun County is a destination location for retirees, Florida summer halfbacks and Atlanta weekenders. Perfect for someone just getting into the industry or someone who wants to slow down and look for a nice place to retire.

Family-owned chain that appears to be stable. They understand their place in the food chain, which is delivering weekly newspapers to rural markets that are well outside of competition with the AJC, The State, Charlotte or any TV stations -- unless a huge story breaks in the mountains. So they're well insulated from web penetration. The sister paper in our county still has prominent local ads, a decent classified section and lots of public notices. That's enough to pay a full-time editor, news reporter, sports guy, sales person and office staff. I think they also freelance some of their entertainment.

Public high school will probably take up 90 percent of your time. Two private schools (Rabun Nacoochee and Tallulah Falls) have athletic programs as well. Lake Burton is close by, as is Kingwood CC and a nine-hole muni. Great fishing, hiking and boating as well.

Cons:

The closest you'll get to the Dawgs or the pros is writing a feature about a Rabun County kid who gets to that level. It's a hyper-local job, which means running photos of the homecoming queen, marching band and cheerleaders, in addition to every YMCA and middle school kid in uniform. I'm guessing there are golf leagues and hunting and fishing photos as well.

The guy here gets three, maybe four pages in the fall, winter and spring -- one of those a syndicated NASCAR page and another for a weekly sponsored football pick 'em -- and a couple in the summer to tout the guys who made the minor leagues and 7-on-7 football. He shoots home and away football games on Friday nights, and fills the rest with coach call-ins and releases from the college.

In reality, Asheville and Atlanta are a good two hours away, but don't assume you'll have the time or money to spend in either location. In addition to your own work, sounds like you'll be putting the rest of the paper together, so budget your time wisely.

And I don't know how much affordable housing is there. Gas prices are cheap, but Rabun's a good piece from most of the other schools in their conference/region.

 

We've passed through Clayton and the surrounding area many times on our way to/from western North Carolina and even have researched it as a possible retirement location. It's beautiful, with a lot to see and do (especially if you're the outdoors type) and some spectacular views of the Blue Ridge Mountains. But, as Maumann indicated, affordable housing could be a sticking point. It's a resort-type area and somewhat of a playground for the rich -- in fact, I think Nick Saban either has or used to have a mansion-sized "cabin" on one of the nearby lakes -- so the demand for housing has pushed prices beyond the norm for typical small towns. You'd have to do some due diligence about the situation before accepting a job there.

From what I can tell, though, it's a pretty good company with decent products. And I certainly fit into the "wants to slow down and look for a nice place to retire" category -- although with the number of hats this employee would have to wear, I'm not sure a "slowdown" is realistic.