Sports Editor, Ventura County (Calif.) Star

Company: Ventura County Star
Position: Sports Editor
Location: Camarillo, California
Job Status: Full-time
Salary: Not Specified
Ad Expires: August 5, 2011
Job ID: 1266028

Description:

The Ventura County Star, VenturaCounty’s leading newspaper and website, has an opening for a Sports Editor to advance the success of our newspaper, niche products, web and mobile offerings.

Sitting on the edge of the great Los Angelessports market, Ventura County Star has carved out its niche in sports with extraordinary coverage of prep and community college athletics. The Star covers the games our readers want, provides the numbers that sports fans crave and then goes beyond to tell the stories of the people who are involved. The Star sports department has a tradition of digging into stories of importance that can and do play on the front page.

The Sports Editor will lead a staff of six veteran and talented writers. We are looking for a strong and experienced editor who will work with this staff to help them improve their writing and reporting, and to deepen the connection between our coverage and our readers. A healthy freelance budget complements that staff coverage and supports daily local prep roundups.

The Sports Editor is responsible for daily coordination with the Scripps West Central Desk, which handles page production and wire editing based on direction from the Sports Editor. The Star sports pages must reflect the interests of our readers, ranging from recreational sports to the all the professional leagues. The Sports Editor directly handles editing of all local content, determines story placement throughout the section and approves all sports pages nightly.


The Sports Editor is also expected to be a leader in driving local sports content to digital to provide a quick, rich and exclusive source of stories and information.

We offer a competitive compensation package including base salary, paid time off, medical, dental, vision and disability benefits.

Ventura County Star is part of the E.W. Scripps Company, a diverse 130-year-old media enterprise with interests in television stations, newspapers, local news and information web sites, and licensing and syndication

Please see complete job description on our company site listed below.

To apply please visit our careers site at http://www.scripps.com/careers/search-jobs and select requisition #3751.

 

Hasn't this job been open quite a bit, or am I confusing it with other jobs?

 

What's their place in the LA market. Are they in as bad a shape as Antelope Valley appears to be?

 

One of the problems with this one, as with the AVP, is that neither one is going to be willing to pay an adequate salary for what they want out of the position for a sports editor living in Southern California.

The AVP, from what I have seen and heard, wants to position itself as a peripheral player in the L.A. market, then turn around and pay employees like it is out in the boonies in a city where the cost of living is not as high. So it sends a mixed message.

The Star used to also consider itself a peripheral player in the L.A. market, but has totally pulled out of that. Yes, lots of Dodgers/Lakers copy still appears in the section, but it is all AP. And whomever gets this gig walks into a situation where they fired the last sports editor at the same time as moving all of the design operation to Texas, a little more than 18 months ago if memory serves me correctly.

The Star used to be a very good paper with a good mix of L.A. professional sports and local preps/colleges. It's a shell of what is used to be, unfortunately.

 

The difference here, however, is Ventura has one of the highest costs of living in SoCal and the Antelope Valley has one of the lowest. Relatively speaking, of course.

The VC Star still does an adequate job, especially on golf, with the ubiquitous Bob Buttitta covering the Masters every year and carpet-bombing local coverage. But as noted above, they've whacked some good folks (David Lassen, among others) and are a shell of what they used to be.

 

Yeah, cost of living in Ventura County is pricey, that's for sure. Add in the paper's recent proclivity for cutting staff, and it's a dicey situation all the way around, as you ahve to wonder whether they can get a top-notch candidate to sign on for the built-in headaches.

Birdscribe is right ... there are areas where the Star still does a decent job with sports coverage. But this used to be a really good paper that covered a lot of different things well. Now, not so much. And as someone who reads it regularly, the copy editing has really fallen off. Whether that is a result of the design shift to Texas, I can't say. But it certainly couldn't have helped.

 

The office is in Camarillo now, not as expensive as Ventura ... and the outlet mall is right next door so there are good deals on clothes and kitchenware.

 

Camarillo still ain't cheap. The only affordable places to live in Ventura County are Oxnard -- between Camarillo and Ventura and featuring an insane crime rate -- and the smaller towns on the opposite side of the mountain range such as Santa Paula and Fillmore.

 

The Ventura County Star has made its hire. Not sure who it is, but interviewed a pair of guys last week and made the call to "the guy."

 

I believe the new hire is from Pocatello