writer and/or desk, Culpeper, Va.

We're losing a good one at the Culpeper Star-Exponent. Sports writer Jason Simcoe has decided to leave the business and go home to Cincinnati. We'll hopefully get permission soon to post a job ad and hire someone, but in the meantime I thought I would encourage anybody looking for a job to send their resumes my way.

Jason's exit will leave us down two positions in the newsroom. We should be able to fill one, if not both. If we fill only one, we may ask the new person to be the primary sports designer, but also do some news pages occasionally and probably have some writing opportunities available. If we fill both spots, we will hire someone to do what Jason did, which included plenty of writing and desk duties.

The Star-Exponent is an 8,000 circulation daily between Charlottesville and D.C. We’re a Media General paper that has actually had an increasing circulation in a growing area. We cover two high schools primarily with plans to be more aggressive in our coverage of schools in the surrounding counties in the coming school year.

We cover a lot of the small-town stuff that probably won’t get a lot of you excited, but high schools eat up a lot of space on our pages and we did staff every home U.Va. football game last year and a handful of basketball games. This year we have a couple of local kids that might get some playing time at U.Va., plus a bunch of kids at other D-I’s around the state that we’ll be writing about.

Feel free to PM or e-mail (smettlen@starexponent.com) any questions. Send your resume and clips to:
Culpeper Star-Exponent
Attn: Shane Mettlen, Sports Editor
471 James Madison Highway, Suite 102
Culpeper, Va. 22701

 

The second high school is new in 2008, Eastern View. EVHS will compete in the Battlefield District, which means whoever gets the job covering the Cyclones can anticipate trips to Stafford, Spotsylvania and Caroline Counties. Culpeper County High School plays in the Cedar Run District, which includes four Prince William County schools, two Fauquier County schools and Loudoun Valley.

Culpeper is 45 miles from Charlottesville and 20 miles from Orange, but neither high school plays games there very often. But if this proves accurate, you could expect to see Orange High School, possibly William Monroe and Madison, along with some of the Culpeper schools' district rivals added to your workload.

 

NightHawk has it right. There's about a 95 percent chance CCHS joins the Battlefield District after next year, which will make covering the two county schools a little easier.

I didn't shake things up a lot in my first year here, but one thing I've been thinking about since I got here was that with the new school we would get the opportunity for more features and enterprise.

In the past our coverage has been heavy on the gamers. With one school in Culpeper we covered virtually every high school athletic event played within the county. Now that a second school is opening up we have to change our approach anyway, so we figured it was a good time to work in more coverage of the surrounding schools. The Star-Exponent is the closest daily circulating in Orange, Madison and Rappahannock Counties and Liberty High School is in Fauquier Co., but 15 minutes away from our office.

Culpeper Co. and Eastern View will certainly be our focus, but there are plenty of stories to write about those other schools that, frankly, are a lot more compelling than the gamers we were writing about a 2-15 volleyball team last year.

 

I think it's a sure thing that Culpeper Co. joins the Battlefield in 2009. The VHSL appears to only be evaluating four of the 12 regions, and CCHS appears safely in Region I for '09. What that means is that parts of every school but Eastern View's coverage will change after one year.