Sports Writer, Flagstaff, AZ

shouldn't you be working on your novel?

 

I don't know what's considered the metro area up there, Page, most of the Navajo rez? The AZ Republic gets distributed up there. Plus, Flag's a college town and college kids don't read anyway.

 

Hello all, young journalist working in New Hampshire here.

Thinking about throwing my hat into the ring for this job... my girlfriend and I have wanted to move to Arizona for a long time. Any advice on this position, the SE, the area, etc?

Thanks.

 

As everyone else has said, Flagstaff is a great town, but definitely not the easiest place to find a decent place to live at that salary...

And FYI, this isn't "Arizona" like you see in the pictures or here about it being so hot. Flagstaff is definitely a four-season town, and from what i've seen, has actually never topped 100 degrees (definitely nothing like the Phoenix area )... That's not a bad thing, trust me, just wanted you to know that Flagstaff more resembles Colorado than it does "typical" Arizona...

 

Good stuff. Thank you, zona.

 

Anyone who wants the skinny from Flagstaff (lived there for six years) or the AZ Daily Sun (worked there for three years), fire up the ol' PM machine and I'll share what I know.

For the basics on the city, yes, you can get by on $25k in Flagstaff, though you'll likely have a roommate. I was being paid MUCH less than that during my stint there and enjoyed my time. It's four seasons for sure -- don't forget you're at 7,000 feet in the mountains. The spring, summer and fall are just superb weather, and if you like snow in the pines, you'll enjoy winter too. The wife and I still go to Flag a couple of times a year for long weekends, so yeah, you could say I liked it. It's a little hippie mountain town and it has more good restaurants than the big area I live in now.

As for the paper, go the PM route ... that's neither good nor bad, just paranoid ...

 

$25,000? Wow, I worked at a community paper down the mountain about an hour away and got paid more than that back in 2000 ... They even paid for some of my moving expenses ...

Arizona is a very cool place to live. Lived there for four years and miss it a lot...

 

Lee is notoriously cheap, at least out West. I worked full-time as the SE at a weekly and had to work at McDonalds 10 hours a week on top of the paper to pay my bills. All while living in a glorified dorm. Good times, good times.

 

Was Mel's Diner closed?

That's all I've got on Flagstaff.

 

Curious to see the Kerrville paper (which also has a job opening posted on this board), which is in a town of 20k with little "metro" area to speak of, has a circulation of 10k...

It just seems like a little bit of a red flag that this paper only has a 12k circulation. My current paper serves a metro area of 223k with a circulation of 40k, which means better than 1 in 6 get the paper. In Flagstaff, it's not even 1 in 10. That's not great market penetration (I got the market size from Wikipedia, for what it's worth...maybe somebody made up a metro size number for Flagstaff and it's actually a much smaller market...).

I'm not trying to knock the Flagstaff paper nor toot the horn of my own employer. I'm just trying to get a feel for what the situation is there.

 

The one difference (and I could be wrong, depending on your area) is that a lot of the Flagstaff population is the students at any given time. The university is close to 15k, and Flagstaff is also a second-home community for many Californians. That said, even the student paper at NAU has a larger circulation than the Daily Sun. They're just not very good at promoting the product, and they also don't get a lot of money from Lee (nee Pulitzer) to do so.