Sports Writer, Columbus, Ga.

The Ledger-Enquirer, a McClatchy-owned daily newspaper in Columbus, Ga., has an immediate opening for a prep sports reporter to join its staff.

The ideal candidate will have at least one year of experience as a reporter in a professional newsroom. We’re looking for someone who can think and write clearly, is naturally inquisitive and demonstrates energy, tenacity and enterprise. Applicants must be familiar with online journalism and social media.

There are 17 high schools in our primary coverage area, which includes Georgia and Alabama. This position requires plenty of writing, blogging and producing video for the Web. Football and recruiting are the major parts of the beat, but there are 12 other sports to cover as well. We're looking for someone who is adept at writing project stories as well as game coverage.

Columbus is a growing city that’s a 90-minute drive from downtown Atlanta. It is home to Fort Benning, one of the largest army posts in the U.S., and is a business center with headquarters for major corporations such as Aflac Insurance, Synovus and TSYS (one of the world’s largest credit card processors). Fort Benning is in the midst of a major expansion that will bring 30,000 people to the area in 2011 as the U.S. Army Armor School moves here from Kentucky.

McClatchy is the nation's third-largest newspaper group. It emphasizes high journalistic standards and embraces an array of new strategies for serving online readers. Other McClatchy papers include The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee, the (Fort Worth) Star- Telegram, The Kansas City Star, The Charlotte Observer and The (Raleigh) News & Observer.

We offer a competitive pay and benefits package.

It is our intention to quickly fill this job. Please e-mail only two items initially: A one-page cover letter and a one-page resume, to Marcia McAllister, assistant to the executive editor, at mmcallister@ledger-enquirer.com.

The resume must include employment and educational history and the names and phone numbers of at least three references. If you do not want us to contact them until checking with you, make that clear on your resume.

The content of your letter and resume will be key in determining whether to proceed with your application.

Please do not send work samples until we ask for them. No telephone calls please.

 

This is my job; I'm leaving to become the sports editor at the Athens Banner-Herald.

Columbus is a good place to live despite what anyone who has driven up parts of Victory Drive says. It's got a lot of old Southern charm, which is cool if like me you grew up in a cookie-cutter suburb. There's quite a bit to do if you're interested in sports with adult rec leagues in everything from soccer to volleyball and ice hockey.

The job is good, too. The Ledger-Enquirer is well-respected in the community, which is nutty for sports. You'll get a great chance to cover some very good teams and state title champs/contenders in just about every sport. They love enterprise stuff, and there is no shortage of topics to dig into. Preps stories routinely land on A1, so this can also be a very prominent beat. And if covering some college athletics appeals to you, you'll likely get the chance down the road as we have local athletes at UGA/Auburn/Alabama/Georgia Tech and about a million smaller schools around the Southeast. I spent many weekends out of town covering those teams as a result.

And if you're looking for a good job to develop in, this is a great one. I definitely only landed my new gig because of the responsibility and versatility I picked up working here, and the previous Athens Banner-Herald sports editor also was a Ledger-Enquirer sports writer before accepting that position. He is now working for ESPN, so he seems to have done well enough for himself.

I'm sure multimedia skills will be a plus as we do a lot of preps blogging and video and have an online-first mentality about sports and news.

If you have any other questions, feel free to PM me.

 

Congrats on the Athens gig. Sounds like a good one.

I'm curious. Were you the prep writer at Columbus, or were you the SE and the prep writer position came open after the dominoes fell? If you went from prep writer to SE in Athens, double congrats!

 

Double thanks as I was the preps writer in Columbus.

 

Congratulations. When I was in Georgia in LaGrange, I always had great respect for the CLE's prep work.

 

If you need this spelled out for you, you're probably not qualified for the job. Or for, you know, much of anything.

 

Man, Columbus has 190k people, according to Wiki. I would have thought half that.

I come from the other direction for games at Auburn, so I usually end up sleeping in Montgomery. Didn't think Columbus was that significant of a town.

 

What's the pay on this one? Is it more than $35K or are you basically just working your tail off waiting for an opportunity to make a better salary at a larger paper?

 

You're new here, aren't you?

 

Yeah, Columbus is a surprisingly busy little place with quite a bit to do if you actually go out and look for it. I had never heard of it before I stumbled across a job posting a little more than three years ago, but I definitely enjoyed my time here.

 

Not new here, but am a veteran sportswriter that is well-established salary-wise and am not looking to regress. Just asking what this would pay.

 

I have always had the impression that the Ledger-Enquirer would rather get the right candidate over the cheapest candidate. My best guess would be low to mid 30s. Your mileage may vary one way or the other, but I would wager it pays a fair amount better than a lot of the preps job on this site, many of which start 10K lower than that.