Sports Editor/writer, Powell, WY

[Drip]

From Journalismjobs.com

The Powell Tribune, a semi-weekly newspaper, in Powell, Wyoming, is looking for an outgoing, energetic sports nut to fill its sports editor position. Strong photography skills a must. $30,000/year, plus benefits, including retirement account after one year. Please send resume, cover letter and photos/sports portfolio to the Powell Tribune, P.O. Box 70, Powell, WY 82435. Email [email protected] for more information

 

[2muchcoffeeman]

Family owned, Tu-Th, salary surprising, MOFNW.

 

[Mark2010]

Some of these weeklies and semi-weeklies pay better than dailies.

Honest question for those who have worked at weeklies or non-dailies:

How many hours a week do you work? How much space (newshole) do you have? Do you sell advertising? Circulation? Help with news side or classifieds?

Coming from a daily background, I can't imagine spending 40 hours per week just filling up 3-4 pages. Hell, I do more than that in an eight-hour shift. Seriously, how many bowling scores and little league scores can you type, anyway? OK, so I go cover a local HS game and write a story. 3-4 hours of work. Probably not going to write more than I would for a daily anyway.

I'm not being facetious here, I'm honestly just curious what else a person does in their 40 hours.

 

[Hackwilson191]

OK, 3-4 hours of work now multiply that by 10 or 12 and then account for the fact you will probably have to layout and design your own pages. A weekly with 3-4 pages is not too bad really. A semi-weekly filling 8 pages without a single drop of wire can be a little harder. Plus you usually have to help out with news side covering vacations and the like.

At a hyper-local semi-weekly you might cover 3-4 games a week and then cover 7-8 other stories by phone. Personally, I have never written less than 10 stories in a week and my record for one week is 21. Of course, I also have a weekly too. So, I have 3 papers to put out a week. No wire. About 3 pages per section. Oh, and most of the photography is done by you as well.

And the best part is, there is no one to cover the games or do the section if you might want a day off. One man shops can be a pain.

 

[KUjhawk02]

From my experience, how busy your weeks are (during the school year) depends on what you want to make of it. If you want to shoot one game a week for art and then do a bunch of stuff over the phone, you can half-ass it and fill space. I try to operate it more like a daily, though, with new content daily on the Web site, video highlights and photo galleries, etc... so I can have weeks anywhere from 40-55 hours (most of the OT on my own time). I work in a pretty good community with a lot of good teams, though, so I don't mind doing an extra game or two per week on my own dime unless I've got something else to do. If I didn't have to paginate then it wouldn't be a big deal, but that comes with the territory.

I have friends at dailies. Some work more hours than I do, some work less (if they're on a two-man staff then they kill themselves for pennies). Some make more. Some make less. On the whole, I've found that weeklies (at least in my area) get an unfair bad rap in this business. I'm guessing that there are others who have had a similar experience. It just depends on the company and the people.

 

[Mark2010]

Like how many schools would you have in your coverage area?

I do some stringing for a small daily and they only cover the one HS in town.... absolutely nothing on the schools in outlying towns 15-30 miles away.

 

[KUjhawk02]

We've got five high schools, although most in the area have one or two schools.

I previously did a weekly that covered one high school, and I still worked gobs of hours. That was my own doing, though. Not demanded by the boss. I ran it like a daily on the Web and about half of what I wrote was Web-only stuff, but the community really embraced it. I was either very motivated, or just young and stupid. Probably a bit of both.

One of the freedoms of a weekly is that you can usually do as much as you want with it. If you want to just crank out a section, you can do it. But if you want to put your stamp on the product by taking it to another level, you can probably do that too.

At the same time, I know some towns in the area that have weeklies that cover just one school, and based on the area I wonder how the heck they can fill a section half the time.

 

[Mark2010]

Wonder how many schools there are to cover in a place like Powell?

Seriously, if you have only one school, how much can you cover until it becomes overkill?

 

[azom]

The Tribune only covers one high school, the hometown Panthers. Good football and wrestling; volleyball team won the state championship last fall and girls hoops is in a good upswing right now. Northwest College is also in Powell; very good JC wrestling and fair-to-good basketball. The sports section is usually about four pages an issue; paper is usually pretty good for what they have to work with. The last guy here was a really good photographer and they used him a lot in that capacity.

Publisher is very, very, very good people.

 

[deskslave]

Wonder how many schools there are to cover in a place like Powell?

Seriously, if you have only one school, how much can you cover until it becomes overkill?

For the people in that town? It can never be too much. Remember, a lot of places that have weekly papers are the kind of places where people spend their whole lives. (Whether that's true of Powell, I couldn't tell you.) They went to that school. Their daddies went to that school. Their kids go to that school. Their grandkids go to that school. Their neighbor's kids ... you get the idea.

 

[Stitch]

Is Powell in oil country? It seems that way from looking at the price of apartments. So that $30k may not go very far.

 

[Voodoo Chile]

At a twice a week paper, I worked infinitely more than I do now at a daily. Not even close. I covered five high schools as a one-man shop, and wrote one story every week about every team at each school, plus a weekly column. During fall sports, that's football, volleyball, girls golf, boys and girls soccer and cross country, plus I covered the local race track on Saturday nights and did the occasional feature or community sports story. Just on preps alone that was 25 stories a week, plus doing all of my own photography.
I actually have days off now at a daily.
That being said, there's got to be a much saner way to cover sports at a weekly that just a weekly story on what every team did that week and has coming up the following week.

 

[Stitch]

Not every sport deserves a full-blown story. And offer to have coaches write-up events.

 

[Hackwilson191]

Not every sports deserves a full-blown story. And offer to have coaches write-up events.

If you want other people doing your work, than I guess that is a way to go. Although, I do let coaches write up middle school sports and send it in. I cover some JV and fish stuff when I have time, but no way do I cover middle school. So, I guess, I could understand you letting coaches do those stories if they want something in the paper.

 

[Stitch]

I'm not going to kill myself to cover a cross country meet or some other sport that hardly anyone cares about except the athletes involved or their relatives. There is a reason there is an college football story on the front page of a local sports section on Saturday's in the fall instead of coverage of the local CC meet.

 

[Hackwilson191]

I'm not going to kill myself to cover a cross country meet or some other sport that hardly
anyone cares about except the athletes involved or their relatives. There is a reason there is an college football story on the front page of a local sports section on Saturday's in the fall instead of coverage of the local CC meet.

There is not a story on the college football game at a weekly or even a semi-weekly that has a larger paper near. Or at least I hope not. If you are paying for AP coverage at a weekly then FAIL.

 

[KUjhawk02]

Actually, a sport like cross country made filling a section a lot easier a few times. It's only about two hours of work at a meet. It's simple to get photos. You grab a quote from a kid or two right after the race so you don't have to wait around for them, and then the extra photos can take up space inside to lighten your work load on a particular week. If the weather's nice and it doesn't overlap with watching college football, then covering a cross country meet's a breeze.

Also, in smaller communities with one high school, I've found that a lot of the people in the community care about how their cross country or soccer or tennis teams are doing, even if they don't care enough to go watch in person.

Now if the local football team is one of the best in the state that season, then things are a bit different.

That said, I agree completely that not every sport merits a full-length story on every competition. And especially when it comes to middle school stuff, having the coach submit results or a short writeup is the way to go. And if a parent whines that their middle school or JV team isn't getting covered, the old line of, "I agree completely that I'd like to have your kid's team included, but I have limited hours as a one-person staff so if YOU would like to track down the results and submit them to me then I will do my best to get it included when I have space available." Putting the onus on the whiny parent has worked well for me in the past when they try to demand more out of you.

 

[ServeItUp]

Powell is not in oil country. It's just east of Cody about 20 miles, so it's a little more than an hour from Yellowstone. Gorgeous country but terribly isolated.

 

[Rumpleforeskin]

Wonder how many schools there are to cover in a place like Powell?

Seriously, if you have only one school, how much can you cover until it becomes overkill?

My last stop was a weekly and we covered one high school. We pretty much exhausted everything we could out of it.

 

[Stitch]

I'm not going to kill myself to cover a cross country meet or some other sport that hardly
anyone cares about except the athletes involved or their relatives. There is a reason there is an college football story on the front page of a local sports section on Saturday's in the fall instead of coverage of the local CC meet.

There is not a story on the college football game at a weekly or even a semi-weekly that has a larger paper near. Or at least I hope not. If you are paying for AP coverage at a weekly then FAIL.

My point wasn't about using the AP. My point was that there is a reason certain sports are covered more extensively than others. Not too many people in any community are going to care about high school tennis or cross country. Some are, but not enough to justify full-blown coverage of every meet.