Sports editor (PT), Ravalli Republic (Hamilton, Mont.)

After 18 months without a sports section, readers in Montana's beautiful Bitterroot Valley are eager to see the exploits of their high school teams captured in print and digitally again in the thrice-weekly Ravalli Republic.

So we're seeking someone with some journalism chops and a sense of adventure to see if they can recapture an avid audience and build a part-time job into a full-time position.

The Republic is a Lee Enterprises paper based in Hamilton and published Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. The footprint covers high schools in Corvallis, Darby, Florence, Hamilton, Stevensville and Victor; your locally produced content will be supplemented by the Missoulian as well as the rest of Lee Montana's 406mtsports.com team -- including Montana Grizzlies and Montana State Bobcats athletics.

The ideal candidate will be a jack-of-all-trades: Covering games, writing features, trafficking pages, taking photos and shooting video. As an important cog in the statewide 406mtsports.com effort, you'll have digital and social media support and assistance in covering your teams when you leave the valley.

Because we know Montana to be "a small town with long streets", your content will be well-read in the Bitterroot Valley and across the state.

When your work shifts are over, you'll have access to some of the nation's most beautiful landscapes: Fishing and floating the Bitterroot River, camping, hiking, bicycling, plus easy scenic drives to Yellowstone and Glacier national parks.

The position is 25 hours per week to start, paying $15/hr. For the right person in the right situation, it could be a great gig.

We are an equal-opportunity employer. You can see our website at www.ravallirepublic.com and learn more about our parent company at www.lee.net.

For more information or to apply, email 406mtsports.com executive sports editor Jeff Welsch at jeff.welsch@406mtsports.com.

 

Damn. A one-person sports staff, trying to restart the sports section, writing, shooting photos and videos and designing pages.

And you get 25 hours a week at $15 an hour to do it. I get it could develop into a FT job, but damn.

 

Pardon me while I laugh my ass off. There is NO way this works.

 

It might. There’s no pagination involved — that’ll be handled by the hub at the NWI. Lotsa high schools, though.

 

Not trying to rip Jeff, but this just shows how much of a disaster the business is. If the best a college kid can hope for is a part-time job in Montana where he pulls less than $20k a year, what’s the point?

 

Guessing a lot of this job will be damage control at the start, with no coverage beyond "The hometown guys won last night and their parents are very proud of them," presumably, for the last 18 months.

 

Communicating with design hub and waiting for it to finish designing pages is a drag. But it may work out for someone with another source of income.

 

I’ve spent some time recently in the towns named. No way you can get much accomplished in 25 hours a week as a start-up. You’d spend 10 of those hours just driving up and down Hwy 93.
The newspaper industry makes a midnight shift at an Amazon warehouse look attractive.

 

'Could develop into a full-time job' is an interesting way of saying 'even if someone actually does manage to work themselves into carpal-tunnel by making this commercially viable, we're definitely never going to give you full-time benefits'.

 

How are things at the Yellowstone Dutton Chief Joseph Ranch?