Sports Page Designer- Hickory, NC

From jjobs.com
http://www.journalismjobs.com/Job_Listing.cfm?JobID=1558806

Company: Hickory Daily Record - BH Media
Position:
Sports Page Designer
Location:
Hickory, North Carolina
Job Status: Full-time
Salary: $25,000 to $30,000
Ad Expires:
February 24, 2014
Job ID: 1558806

Description:

Sports Page Designer

The Consolidated Editing Center is located in Hickory, N.C. and is the design hub for most of the BH Media newspapers in the southeast. The center designs and lays out pages for papers in North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama and Florida. The majority of our employee’s time is spent designing pages; however, they also edit all stories that are processed through the CEC.

We are searching for the next full-time sports page designer/copy editor.

The preferred candidate will be well-versed in Adobe InDesign, Adobe Photoshop, AP Style, basic grammar and editing skills. The candidate must be able to demonstrate basic layout and design abilities. General news, sports and agate knowledge is a plus.

Please email managing editor Jon LaFontaine (jlafontaine@hickoryrecord.com) with your resume and three clips that best exemplify your work. If you would like to be part of the fast-paced, energetic world of media, please apply today!

 

I'm the editor in Hickory (although I don't oversee the Consolidated Editing Center), but I can answer questions if anybody wishes to private message me.

I've been here two months, and I absolutely love the Hickory area. Lots of good outdoors activities and Hickory is a retail/restaurant hub for the metro area (340,000 folks). The nightlife is decent, but not outstanding. Charlotte is about an hour away, so a lot of folks trek there for concerts, sporting events, etc...

I don't work in the CEC, but everybody I've dealt with there has been absolutely phenomenal. It's a staff of 40 or so, and they work on products of varying sizes.

Like I said, if you've got questions, please don't hesitate to PM me.

 

I know nothing of the CEC and little of the Daily Record outside a 2006 job interview in the Good Ol Days when a copy editor copy edited for the one paper, but I can verify Scott's thoughts about Hickory. It's got enough stuff going on within the immediate area that you won't be bored, but it's also less than two hours away from awesome Asheville and underrated Greensboro and Winston-Salem along with Charlotte. Cost of living is pretty good too.

 

It's also not too far from Blowing Rock and Boone if you like the mountains. There are definitely worse places to live than Hickory.

 

Wow! How many different publications --- specifically dailies --- are they producing there?

 

Jesus, that guy must be busy.

 

Good question. I had to ask the CEC ME that question, so I apologize for the delay in responding. The CEC in Hickory produces 24 newpapers, and 10 of them are dailies. The biggest paper the CEC produces is the Winston-Salem Journal, and they have some other solid-sized papers (15K-30K) with Hickory, N.C., Dothan, Ala., and Florence, S.C.

 

Thanks. I did not realize they had consolidated so many different properties there.

Sounds like an opportunity worth exploring for the right person and it would be interesting to see how the responsibilities are broken down. (Does a given person specialize in 2-3 different properties? Do they do standard pages for multiple papers like Gannett has done? Does a person do multiple sections on the same paper or, say, do sports on several papers?). With that many properties, there are a lot of ways it could work.

 

Good questions, Mark. The way the CEC operates is newspapers are grouped by location. Each group has a team leader and designers who typically work on properties in that group, so you build familiarity with the products. Then, separately, there is a Sports group, and those folks work almost exclusively on sports. Again, designers typically work on the same products to build familiarity. For example, with Hickory, I have the same 4-5 designers each week designing our news section.
One thing I like about the CEC is the designers are in constant communication with editors and there’s an opportunity to build a rapport. Now, I’ll admit I’m a little spoiled, because I can go over and meet with my designer for the day each day, but the CEC folks really go out of their way to work with editors so the product they’re producing is good. Another thing you mentioned: There are not “standard pages” for all publications (our “World” page is different from other papers’ “World Page”), but they do work on specialty pages that other publications can use (a Super Bowl preview page/a weekly NASCAR page for example).
Couple of other things to note: Designers from our CEC have moved on to bigger publications. One recently left for the Richmond Times-Dispatch and one took the graphics editor job at the Bradenton, Fla., newspaper. Do well here and you can move up, like in any other job. … We’re owned by Berkshire Hathaway, so there’s a little bit more stability at our properties. The company also owns the Greensboro (N.C.) paper and the Richmond Times-Dispatch, so there are opportunities to move to a bigger paper. … They’re understaffed now with some positions open, but when fully staffed the workload appears manageable. I’ve worked some design jobs where the work far outweighed the staffing, and I don’t see that here. I’ll readily admit I don’t work back there and know the day-to-day, hour-to-hour rigors of the job, but they seem to be sufficiently staffed for the amount of work they’re expected to produce (when fully staffed, obviously).

 

Re-reading the original post, it appears the job is a combo editing/design position. I always liked doing both and I found it easier to paginate pages that I actually edited the copy for. That way you can actually see how a story fits on the page and move things around when needed, rather than passing it off to someone else.

Given the list of papers that B-H owns in the region, I guess I'm surprised that they chose Hickory for the CEC, but that must speak well of the facilities and location that they choose it over Greensboro, Richmond and some other places.

 

Mark: The CEC was set up before B-H owned the property (back in the awful days of MG ownership). At the time, the company didn't own Greensboro, so that's why they don't have a hub (but they do design their own pages). Richmond has its own design staff that does its pages, and Lynchburg, Va., does pages for the Virginia properties. I think it surprised some Hickory got the design services over Winston-Salem, but I wasn't here to know the reasoning behind it. Again, MG was running things here at that time.

Our CEC staffers do edit and design. But the folks at each property are expected to edit, as well, so CEC staffers aren't getting raw copy (at least they're not supposed to).