Sports Editor, Opelika-Auburn News

You are different in the pecking order... and many of the others get crapped on and pay for your extra needs to get Auburn in by sacrificing their deadlines, so to speak. You are different because of your college football needs... ask the other smaller, non-major college papers about their lives. Obviously, being hundreds of miles away, the wool can go over the eyeballs quite easily. Good luck... if you were a paper in the Carolinas (and knew the whole story) you'd be very worried.

 

We print our own paper. We're not holding up anybody but ourselves to accommodate pushing the sports deadline back to fit in stories from late games. The designers that work on our section for high school and college football Fridays and Saturdays during the fall are designing our paper alone that night. We're not taking their attention away from any other newspaper in the BH Media chain. The person who (hopefully, someday) comes in to be our next sports editor would see that.

 

Spoken by someone who probably has never stepped foot in your design center... so clueless what actually goes on. JV would be the correct name, then.

 

whats with all the hostility and hate? if you dont like the way a paper does its stuff, dont apply for the job.

 

Nothing hostile or hateful... just statement of facts, which carry no emotion. If a job is posted and someone working there says this, this and this... and it's not the way it actually happens, the folks who know the truth should speak out so anyone considering the job has ample insight and perhaps can ask questions they might want to know answers to. If someone tells me working for The Washington Post means your job will be A, B and C and it turns out to be D, E and F... that's not a good thing. Just not a fan of centralized editing centers and my experiences with them -- actual day-to-day working -- are vastly different than JV experienced. Again, nothing hostile or hateful about giving that insight.

 

I completely respect your opinion. I've never much cared for the "hub" thing, either. I know a number of people who have lost their jobs because of them, which we have seen way too often in this business of late. And I've never worked with Gannett or Gatehouse or any hub other than BH Media. What I have dealt with from the BH design center in Hickory over the last year is all I know in terms of design centers.

But the description I've laid out here is nothing but the truth about the sports editor job at the Opelika-Auburn News. I cannot speak for any other job at any other paper, and I would not try to. I'm not selling anyone here anything false. I haven't had a sports editor in four months. For one of those months, I was literally the only member of the sports staff. I budgeted, wrote and proofed the section every night, and worked the design center on a daily basis. You might know more about hubs than I do. That's fine. You can have that. But don't call me JV on a thread about a job at the Opelika-Auburn News. You don't know more about my job than I do.

 

Jobs aren't really that different within BH Media... check out how many others are 1-person staffs. U may be waiting a long time for a partner... and 4 months understaffed is a blimp on the screen really (acknowledging it's tough but there have been much, much, much longer stretches of that elsewhere). If you are budgeting, writing, proofing and shepherding you section on a daily basis, welcome to the BH game plan. JV or varsity, work 60, turn in 40... as a newbie -- if I read correctly you are at 1 year -- the light bulb will go on at some time. Don't take my word for it... ask others in the industry. Wishing you luck.

 

My shop a thousand miles west has sent two people to this paper in the last 15 years, one writing and one backshop. Both came wee-wee-wee back to our paper.

 

From what I have seen and read, Oppie is a reasonably good newspaper and, in sports, has/had decent staffing (I heard 5 people in sports but by now it could be 1). Auburn sports, as one might imagine, can bring a certain demand that a section not turn into a throw-it-together or have a Saturday game against whomever in the Monday paper. But in other college towns, BH Media isn't necessarily in the 'we really care' mode. Depends probably on the location, the editor and the publisher... not much different than any chain, per say -- and there are a lot of papers out there across the country, BH or not, that don't have the market cornered on brilliance in those positions (you can be an editor without ever having been a reporter or when you do come to the office... sit around and fancy yourself as a real editor...same as I tell myself every day that I'm really an award-winning actor). Can't (and don't) fault JV for aspiring to produce best product that can be done; it may be the only saving grace/confidence builder when the direct deposit comes and you openly wonder "Why am I doing this?" Oh well, things will soon be fine -- the NFL will start playing games.