Who'd you rather: Rivals vs. Newspaper

And from what I've heard, there is a lot of that out there. There are also site publishers who do a better job than any of the papers covering the team.

Some of the sites are really making the investment to make the product good. Others are going the cheap and lazy route.

 

Worked for one of the better Scout sites on a part time basis. They have a completely inexplicable power structure. One guy from the Kansas site was supposed to be supervising dozens of them, and never returned emails. Big "initatives" like becoming MySpace sports were announced and never happened. It was all very odd - didn't mind being a part of it, but not sad to have gotten out either.

 

That's b/c Scout is the clusterfuck to end all clusterfucks. Got bought by Fox, which wanted MySpace and took Scout as part of the deal. In typical Fox fashion, it wanted the wrong part. Let Scout wither and just about die on the vine while it poured stupid resources into MySpace, which is now deader than newspapers, and the idea of MySpaceSports, which never even got the chance to become the New Coke of the Internet Era. What a fucking abomination full of clueless idiots, from top to bottom.

 

Well, technically he's right. Online usually fires you when the venture capital runs out, long before the company hits the stock market.

 

You may also want to consider the amount of hours worked for the online site vs. the newspaper job. I'm guessing the Rivals guy is putting in a lot more hours and since he's the site manager/editor/head honcho he's working on salary and not getting OT, like said newspaper writer.

 

I seriously doubt that's the case for most of them. Of the guys I know who have gone from beat writer at the paper to Rivals, they all say the workload is significantly less and they get a lot more down time than at the paper. The exceptions may be the schools where there is enough interest to cover football, basketball and a spring sport and at most of those places, the Rivals site has at least two people to share the workload. I don't know how many Rivals sites cover the smaller sports.