Sports Editor, The Monitor, McAllen, Texas

Here are the basics if anyone is interested. I filled this role roughly from 2000-2007:

The Monitor is a 40,000-daily newspaper with four full-time sports journalists not including the SE. Applicant must be able to handle a wide-variety of tasks on a daily basis, including budgeting stories, turning in photo requests, updating Facebook and Twitter accounts, as well as our sports web pages (TheMonitor.com) and our high school sports site (RGVSports.com). Covering sports and designing pages comes with the territory as well.

The Monitor covers primarily two counties (Starr and Hidalgo), with roughly 60 high schools ranging from Class A-5A. Our busy time of year comes around August-December when the high school football season is in full-swing. We like to have hyper-local coverage of our high school teams, but give the professional teams their due. We cover the RGV Vipers of the NBA D-League and the CHL RGV Killer Bees.

Knowledge of Microsoft Word, InDesign are a must, along with expert knowledge of Facebook and Twitter.

 

what is the pay? can you know quark and not indesign?

 

If you know Quark, InDesign is a bit different, but you can pick it up. I was thrown into the fire when we had to first start our magazine in InDesign. I had only worked with Quark before, but I managed.

Salary I'd rather not post here (typical editor response, I know) but if you email me I can expand on it a bit more. oscar@themonitor.com

 

Decent paper in a growing market, not far from the US-Mexico border.

They also cover the University of Texas-Pan American, a small D-I school which has basketball and baseball. Not sure if they still travel with the hoops team as they did in the mid 1990s, when I was assistant SID at the university. Emphasis is primarily the high schools. Football is big, although they are stuck in the same geographic region as the Austin and San Antonio schools, making it difficult to go really deep in the playoffs. (Athletes had the skill and speed, but often lacked the size to compete with the schools from those cities.)

Large Hispanic population, so ability to speak/read/write Spanish is helpful. My lasting memory of my years there was wearing shorts in 77-degree weather on Christmas Eve one year. Cost of living seems reasonable and Texas has no state income tax.

This could be a really, really, really good gig for the right person.