Cover UVA football, Charlottesville VA

Thanks for the responses ...

 

This is one advantage small papers have over metros. Most metros don't have sport specific beat writers for each college. Usually it's because they have multiple reporters on pro beats, but it's nice to see the smaller papers go nuts with their college beat(s).
Spent many Saturdays at Scott Stadium. Awesome setting.

 

And The Washington Post's beat writer seems to write as much about Maryland as Virginia ... even as Virginia outperforms Maryland in football and men's basketball. (Yes, I'm well aware that the Terrapins are far more popular in Washington metro area.)

 

Just took a quick look, this year Yanda's written less than a handful of Maryland stories, compared to dozens of UVa stories, but it does seem like the UVa beat writer at The Post gets asked to fill in other places.

 

Yanda used to do Maryland before switching to UVa ... looks like Liz Clarke is on Maryland hoops full time with Prisbell on the national scene and Terps football.

 

I'm thinking Liz will be heading to Daytona for Speed Weeks pretty soon, though. She's the Post's NASCAR writer.

 

She made the trip to Clemson for hoops last week. That's accurate.

 

Blows my mind that the Tidewater papers don't cover UVa full time. Not like they have major league sports in town, and aside from Redskins I doubt they do anything with Washington teams.

 

I'm well aware. Yanda's been on the Virginia beat for two seasons yet served as one of the lead reporters for the Randy Edsall hiring. Obviously, the talented young man has some excellent sources in the Maryland administration. Why they would take him off the beat is beyond me.

Prisbell's been on Maryland football for years now. Yanda was on national football and Maryland basketball.

 

This is a little off topic, but Cosmo brings up a good point. The WaPo likes to switch its sports writers' beats every couple of years. As I understand it, they do that so no one's afraid to write a critical story that completely ruins their working relationship with the people they cover.

But it seems to come at quite an expense. The longer you're on a beat, the more sources you get, the better sources you get, and the better reporter you become. The idea of having to start over and build a rapport with new people every 3 years sounds difficult to me.

 

I see your point, but at the same time the paper will be around much longer than the writers will be, so I can see where the paper is protecting itself. And I think fresh faces bring fresh blood to a beat most of the time. Get somebody in there 30 years and yeah they might be connected but they also might be complacent.
This leads to a totally off topic question perhaps better served on the Journalism Topics board. Do the sources belong to you or the place you work for? I wonder if when the Post switches beats around do they require the writers to give up the goods on the folks they've made contacts with, etc.
I had a buddy who replaced a guy who'd been in a spot for 20-plus years. The divorce between the writer and the paper didn't go well, and he took all his contacts with him, forcing my buddy to start from scratch.

Anyway, Charlottesville is nice but can be pricey.

 

I was in Cville today on business and had to stop into a Wells Fargo to make a deposit, and about two people in front of me in line is Pete Gillen.

How nice is Charlottesville? Pete Gillen, who took UVA basketball to new depths of suck, still lives there. Doesn't care what the alums think, f it, he really likes the place.