Switching to news (a specific question)

I know this has been discussed ad nauseum on here, but my question is pretty specific: If you make the switch, can you do so without having to go from, say, a nice spot on the sports totem pole all the way down to covering four car accidents a day?

The jist is this - I'm a sports enterprise guy, a nice job, of course. But I have thoughts that some day I would like to do some news stories of the sort, as well.

I guess something like this would depend on the shop you work at, but I wouldn't want to go into news if it meant that I started off, like I said, being a cops or night reporter (not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. Just not my thing).

Anybody have any similar aspirations or experience?

 

I guess you could say that I, a freelancer for about five papers -- dailies and weeklies -- swing between news and sports semi-regularly.

I write both news and sports for one paper; cover a small-town city council for a second daily, and have written sports almost non-stop in the meantime for 14 years.

I have a second job -- not related to journalism -- so imagine doing what I just mentioned around the second job!!

 

A good reporter is a good reporter. There's a regular here who went from a very nice sports beat to a similarly nice news side gig at his shop. I remember an old boss bringing in a guy who was covering an NFL team to interview for the primo business beat. If you're a smart guy or gal, who pays attention to stuff other than sports and you work with editors who have a clue, then you should be able to transition from covering State U. football to news without having to do night cops or (even worse) night government meetings.

 

On the editing side, I can speak from experience that comparable positions can be found. As a writer, I wouldn't make the switch unless it were to a specific beat; otherwise it could be school briefs or the dreaded weekend GA.