Sports Editor, Stillwater, Okla.

True. I worked for one CNHI paper in another market. They cover what's there and spend 99.99 percent of their time worrying about the bottom line.

This is the company that mandates 5 furlough days per quarter for editorial employees, but not ad staff, never adjusts the size of the paper based on ad demands (Oh, we just had a 3/4 page ad come in, there goes your nation page of sports page or whatever). What I saw was they care very little about journalistic content and actually have reporters punch a time clock similar to auto assembly workers.

Yes, they could build a nice website with both OU and OSU stuff, as well as preps. Someone else who wants to invest will probably come in and do that, but investment is a foreign concept to these rats.

 

How hard would it to be to sell ad space to T. Boone Pickens in exchange for pumped-up OSU coverage?

 

T-Boone's got bigger fish to fry, like Tulsa, OKC, ESPN, FSN, web sites, etc. It would take some work to get the SID staff to simply remember your name. You would be a very small fish in a big pond.

 

Stillwater High has an enrollment of 1473.64 students, according to the OSSAA. That's a below-average 4A in Texas.

Too bad the bosses are from Alabama.

 

Stay far away. Working the graveyard shift at Walmart is a better choice than Stillwater. Seriously.

 

Avoid at all costs. I can't emphasize that enough. And yes, I did work at this "newspaper."

 

I guess I shouldn't be nosey, but what did they do to you?

 

What Phoenix and Chas said. There are big reasons. The list of former NewsPress journos is very long; there is a reason why an entire newsroom has changed over at least twice over the last three-four years. One of the former SEs quit without having a job lined up. Same for two previous top editors, photo editor, etc. Check previous threads.

 

This thread is depressing. I love college towns and college-town papers where you get to enjoy the best of both worlds in terms of small town life with many of the offerings of bigger cities. There are really only so many of those places, and it's sad that the situation in Stillwater is so bad the majority opinion is don't even bother applying.

Every place has taken hits in the past decade or so and Stillwater isn't Athens, Chapel Hill, Boulder, etc., but there's no good reason it couldn't be a good place for journalists to work and live.

 

Stillwater is a nice place to live and work, at first. The town is lovely, it really is, but is dreading the eight hours you go to work every day worth it? I don't know about you, but I got into this business because I love sports journalism. I hated it there. You will fall out of favor. You will be run out of town, eventually. Everybody has so far. At least everybody I know of.

While I haven't worked in Stillwater in more than two years, there's a good chance that nothing has changed. It's a paper where things are micromanaged to the very core, which I might guess is the case with most CNHI papers. It's really hard to describe (and imagine) until you are there.

Just don't go.

 

It seems like the problems may lie more with CNHI than with either the town or the university.

As for college towns, one could do worse than Bryan/College Station, Texas.

 

Not much worse.