Assistant Sports Editor/High Schools

The Sun-Sentinel -- it took a hyphen when I was hired in October 2004 -- paid for my entire moving expenses, including moving cars, as well as a house hunting trip.

 

No copy desk there any more? How are they producing the paper? (This is a serious question -- is it shared in Chicago or something?)

 

I could be wrong, but I think he meant no dedicated sports copy desk. Half the section is produced in Chicago (via various modules), and a copy editor or two pick up the rest of the section editing. Having the whole thing done in Chicago was supposed to happen in 2012, but it never happened. It's pretty bare bones in Ft. Lauderdale as it is, so I guess they figured getting rid of everyone (and then hiring a bunch more in Chicago) wouldn't accomplish much. Yeah, you may replace a $70,000 copy editor with a $45,000 one, but you'd be paying the laid off copy editor $35,000+ in severance, so what's the point? I heard a couple of years ago that having Chicago put together the Hartford paper was much more troublesome than they anticipated, so perhaps that's why they decided not to completely centralize everything in Chicago. Fort Lauderdale and Orlando were supposed to be the next dominoes to fall after Hartford.

 

My knowledge of the arrangement is a bit sketchy, but the "copy desk" for all sections consists of a skeleton crew of about a half-dozen people. This group's main task is to design section fronts and typeset pages. One person is assigned to oversee the sports section. Assistant section editors wind up doing most of the heavy-duty editing (most copy in all sections gets only one read) and handle basic design on the inside pages. National and international pages (including several Tribune-wide sports pages like baseball) are done out of Chicago.

In short, the Sun Sentinel's "dedicated" sports copy desk went away a few years ago in an economy move. In fact, my educated guess is that the new assistant sports editor will wind up doing quite a bit of design work on the high school pages and wherever else they need her to pitch in.

 

Most of the paper is templated -- meaning the pages look the same every day. The sports cover, for example, has a horizontal photo with a story underneath and two stories on the right.

 

I know where you're coming from when you say that, I felt the exact same way about a different paper and job. That was until I actually went there and saw how they operated. They had three times the circ. of my current place, but the desk staffing was about the same. Skeleton crew at night, pages produced off-site and no resources whatsoever. I've seen the same thing at other major metros, once destination papers. But to me, they no longer are. The whole industry has gone down the crapper and I'm not encouraged at all.