N.C. State beat reporter, The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.)

The N.C. State beat reporter breaks news and delivers exclusive enterprise and smart analysis in a fast-paced, competitive environment. The N.C. State beat reporter should have a deep knowledge of the ACC and NCAA and be adept at building sources. A strong source network is vital to being out front of competitors, and this reporter must be able to find and break news, cover breaking news with urgency and develop compelling enterprise and analysis. Games only make up a small percentage of what college athletics are about, and we want someone who is just as comfortable breaking down film as they are filing an open records request or reading through court documents. We also want someone who can bring new ideas to the table and isn’t afraid to try new things with our coverage. In covering one of the most important beats in the Carolinas, the N.C. State reporter will use social media as a news-gathering tool, an engagement opportunity and a means to put our news and enterprise in front of a topic-specific audience across Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other platforms.


Duties and responsibilities:

• Find and break N.C. State news on a competitive beat.
  
  
• Report breaking news as it happens – be fast and first, without sacrificing accuracy and clarity.
  
  
• Build a wide range of sources — from players and coaches locally to agents, ACC officials and experts — to help us maintain our spot as the authority on all-things Wolfpack against local and national outlets for breaking news and enterprise.
  
  
• Write analytically for the sports fans who have watched the game but are looking for a deeper understanding of what they saw.
  
  
• Proactively look for opportunities to tap into trending topics as they relate to N.C. State.
  
  
• Work collaboratively as part of a team with other reporters and editors.
  
  
• Bring your own story ideas to the table, and be ready to take assignments as well.
  
  
• Be a master of social media – both as a news-gathering tool, and as a way to push the news out quickly and build our audience and engagement, as well as your own brand.
  
  
• Understand your audience metrics – which of your stories are resonating with readers, and which are not? Working with your editor, regularly mine this data for takeaways about how we can build and engage our audience.
  
  
• Regularly enhance your stories with your video, third-party video, embedded tweets and links to related stories.
  
  
• Find enterprise stories that make for a deeper read and use storytelling techniques to engage readers.
  

McClatchy is committed to providing equal employment opportunity (EEO) for all applicants and employees. McClatchy considers all candidates without regard to basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, marital status, sexual orientation, ancestry, medical condition, family care status, pregnancy or physical disability (except where physical fitness is a valid occupational qualification), or any other basis protected by state and federal laws.


To apply, please go to the job ad on the McClatchy company website: News & Observer Publishing Co. is looking for a great College Sports Reporter.

 

And if you hate the language of the job description, you can yell at me.

 

Even better than yelling, I put a reminder in my phone to make sure I ask you at least once a week if I've been hired. This post doesn't count as me asking though.

 

Well, I have to do it now.

You’re hired!

 

That was easy! @Matt Stephens I'll be there soon.

 

Yellow pad fluency preferred, particularly in tweets.
(This ad would have looked cool in YP form, actually. As well as a friendly reminder of the very lofty standard you are replacing.)

 

RE audience metrics. Y’all do Google Analytics? Adobe Omniture? Etc etc?

 

Omniture and Parse.ly. And have custom Power BI dashboards set up that pull from Omniture to make everything much more straight forward with PVs, subscriber PVs and subscriptions from stories all in one place. You can sort by reporter and drill through to individual headlines. It's especially handy since in sports we operate as a vertical, so I can see how a story did with overall traffic and subscriptions, and then look closer to see how many of those subs came from the Raleigh paywall stop vs. Charlotte/Columbia/anywhere else.

 

Yeah, but that Yellow Pad thing is real, dude. Your winner better bring it with some quality penmanship

 

Hey @Matt Stephens, two questions, one important and one not so much (you decide which is which):
-Is Rafael your favorite TMNT, and if so, why?
-Do you have a timeline for making a hire for this position?

 

Two important questions there

 

First off, that's Michelangelo in my avatar. COME ON! The original Eastman-Laird comics gave all of the turtles red bandanas. It wasn't until the animated series in 1987 that they added colors so that audiences (mainly kids like myself on Saturday mornings on CBS) could tell them apart easily. And that's my "Um, actuallyyyyyy" moment of the day (Side note: This fake rant is making me want to go dig into my comic backlog I haven't touched since moving to North Carolina.)

Second, we're going to be moving quickly on this. Already a lot of strong applications in the bunch.