Post-Dispatch SE (big surprise, right?)

The interesting question would be: Why is the job getting turned down? Good sports town, right? Not a bad paper by today's standards.

 

Couldn't agree more.

 

How much more would the SE in St. Louis or FtL make?

I can't imagine that number would be enough more than my current number to get me to even blink at these jobs.

 

There's a good point; maybe they are being unrealistic (in terms of $$$) as far as who they target.

 

Here's one guy's theory: I think there are challenges in filling jobs like this and here's why.

The St. Louis paper is going to want someone with a good amount of experience, someone who is either a sitting sports editor at a big paper or a top ASE at a really good paper. In other words, they're going to go after someone who already has a pretty good job.

If you have a pretty good job, something you would consider to be, say, a 7 on a 1-10 scale, would you move for a job that's an 8? You're going to have to sell your house, which is certainly a challenge most places right now. You might have kids in school. You might have a spouse who has a good job. And if you do all that, how do you know your quality of life is going to be better? The paper was sold within the past couple of years and they just had layoffs.

Throw all of that together and I can understand why this gig is somewhat tough to fill.

My guess is that they'll fill it in no time when they expand their candidate pool.

 

Put it this way: It is hard to think of Lee on a national scale (maybe because Lee hasn't done the nasty things that MediaNews, Gannett and KR have done over time that put those companies on our radar screens). That said, this paper is the flagship paper of the Lee chain.

Is Lee still thinking small with the paper? If so, they can't. This paper covers Rams, Blues, college football, college basketball, plenty of preps... and a certain baseball team that gets about half the coverage but no complaints from me (Go Cards)... this is a paper where you need to think big. It's a metro market of about what, a million? The city's about 350,000.

 

Metro market is around 3 million. But I get the point.

 

Both this job and the other obliquely referenced one lost SEs to dot.com sites. It makes mid-career ASEs ) wonder 1) Would anyone take on the jobs' inherent headaches in a past-tense, print-oriented environment; 2) Are there elements in these particular departments that make it easier to jump to an online entity?

 

Problem is Lee is a small-time company operating a big-time paper. That paper has no business being in their hands, based on the way they run things. Lee's small dailies barely function. As much as MediaNews, Gannett and other firms may suck, at least they know how to run big-time, prominent operations.

 

Okay, so I was off by 2 million. I knows the mathematics.

 

Wicked, I suspect there are some folks in Indianapolis, San Jose and a few other Gannett/Media News metros who might disagree with you on that point. And, frankly, the cuts in St. Louis aren't close to what those shops have gone through.
I think the bigger problem might be the amount Lee spent to acquire Pulitzer. It overspent, and now has to cut costs, or at least keep them pretty tight, to meet its quarterly numbers (stock has been in the tank for months). So maybe that means a 10 or 20K difference in what they'll offer an SE at their flagship paper, and a couple of FTEs fewer in his department than he might have had a year, and a buyout (not layoff), ago.
So, yeah, take that, combine it with ACCguy's theory about the uncertainty in both the housing market and the industry, and I can see how they might have to take a few swings before they connect with a top-notch SE candidate.