Sports Editor/writer, Powell, WY

From Journalismjobs.com

The Powell Tribune, a semi-weekly newspaper, in Powell, Wyoming, is looking for an outgoing, energetic sports nut to fill its sports editor position. Strong photography skills a must. $30,000/year, plus benefits, including retirement account after one year. Please send resume, cover letter and photos/sports portfolio to the Powell Tribune, P.O. Box 70, Powell, WY 82435. Email yancy@powelltribune.com for more information

 

Family owned, Tu-Th, salary surprising, MOFNW.

 

Some of these weeklies and semi-weeklies pay better than dailies.

Honest question for those who have worked at weeklies or non-dailies:

How many hours a week do you work? How much space (newshole) do you have? Do you sell advertising? Circulation? Help with news side or classifieds?

Coming from a daily background, I can't imagine spending 40 hours per week just filling up 3-4 pages. Hell, I do more than that in an eight-hour shift. Seriously, how many bowling scores and little league scores can you type, anyway? OK, so I go cover a local HS game and write a story. 3-4 hours of work. Probably not going to write more than I would for a daily anyway.

I'm not being facetious here, I'm honestly just curious what else a person does in their 40 hours.

 

OK, 3-4 hours of work now multiply that by 10 or 12 and then account for the fact you will probably have to layout and design your own pages. A weekly with 3-4 pages is not too bad really. A semi-weekly filling 8 pages without a single drop of wire can be a little harder. Plus you usually have to help out with news side covering vacations and the like.

At a hyper-local semi-weekly you might cover 3-4 games a week and then cover 7-8 other stories by phone. Personally, I have never written less than 10 stories in a week and my record for one week is 21. Of course, I also have a weekly too. So, I have 3 papers to put out a week. No wire. About 3 pages per section. Oh, and most of the photography is done by you as well.

And the best part is, there is no one to cover the games or do the section if you might want a day off. One man shops can be a pain.

 

From my experience, how busy your weeks are (during the school year) depends on what you want to make of it. If you want to shoot one game a week for art and then do a bunch of stuff over the phone, you can half-ass it and fill space. I try to operate it more like a daily, though, with new content daily on the Web site, video highlights and photo galleries, etc... so I can have weeks anywhere from 40-55 hours (most of the OT on my own time). I work in a pretty good community with a lot of good teams, though, so I don't mind doing an extra game or two per week on my own dime unless I've got something else to do. If I didn't have to paginate then it wouldn't be a big deal, but that comes with the territory.

I have friends at dailies. Some work more hours than I do, some work less (if they're on a two-man staff then they kill themselves for pennies). Some make more. Some make less. On the whole, I've found that weeklies (at least in my area) get an unfair bad rap in this business. I'm guessing that there are others who have had a similar experience. It just depends on the company and the people.

 

Like how many schools would you have in your coverage area?

I do some stringing for a small daily and they only cover the one HS in town.... absolutely nothing on the schools in outlying towns 15-30 miles away.

 

We've got five high schools, although most in the area have one or two schools.

I previously did a weekly that covered one high school, and I still worked gobs of hours. That was my own doing, though. Not demanded by the boss. I ran it like a daily on the Web and about half of what I wrote was Web-only stuff, but the community really embraced it. I was either very motivated, or just young and stupid. Probably a bit of both.

One of the freedoms of a weekly is that you can usually do as much as you want with it. If you want to just crank out a section, you can do it. But if you want to put your stamp on the product by taking it to another level, you can probably do that too.

At the same time, I know some towns in the area that have weeklies that cover just one school, and based on the area I wonder how the heck they can fill a section half the time.

 

Wonder how many schools there are to cover in a place like Powell?

Seriously, if you have only one school, how much can you cover until it becomes overkill?

 

The Tribune only covers one high school, the hometown Panthers. Good football and wrestling; volleyball team won the state championship last fall and girls hoops is in a good upswing right now. Northwest College is also in Powell; very good JC wrestling and fair-to-good basketball. The sports section is usually about four pages an issue; paper is usually pretty good for what they have to work with. The last guy here was a really good photographer and they used him a lot in that capacity.

Publisher is very, very, very good people.

 

For the people in that town? It can never be too much. Remember, a lot of places that have weekly papers are the kind of places where people spend their whole lives. (Whether that's true of Powell, I couldn't tell you.) They went to that school. Their daddies went to that school. Their kids go to that school. Their grandkids go to that school. Their neighbor's kids ... you get the idea.

 

Is Powell in oil country? It seems that way from looking at the price of apartments. So that $30k may not go very far.

 

At a twice a week paper, I worked infinitely more than I do now at a daily. Not even close. I covered five high schools as a one-man shop, and wrote one story every week about every team at each school, plus a weekly column. During fall sports, that's football, volleyball, girls golf, boys and girls soccer and cross country, plus I covered the local race track on Saturday nights and did the occasional feature or community sports story. Just on preps alone that was 25 stories a week, plus doing all of my own photography.
I actually have days off now at a daily.
That being said, there's got to be a much saner way to cover sports at a weekly that just a weekly story on what every team did that week and has coming up the following week.