Sports Reporter, Staunton, VA.

From jjobs:

Company: The News Leader
Position: Sports Reporter
Location: Staunton, Virginia
Job Status: Full-time
Salary: Negotiable
Ad Expires: August 7, 2006
Job ID: 655958


Description:
Experienced, versatile sports reporter needed for our reader-focused newspaper in Virginia's beautiful Shenandoah Valley.
The ideal candidate will be a strong reporter and writer, able to thoroughly cover a beat, write quickly for ongoing Web updates, develop solid daily stories and have an eye for stories to be developed into larger enterprise reports. An ear for reader interests is critical, because we're out to delivery quality journalism on topics readers care most about.

With a small sports department, the ideal candidate also will have some experience and aptitude with QuarkXpress or other publishing programs, just to help out at vacation time or in a crunch.

While we will entertain select entry-level applicants with considerable college newspaper and internship experience, we consider this the ideal position for someone now on a small daily or large weekly newspaper looking to move up into a successful farm team that's part of a larger organization. Web writing and editing experience is desirable.

Our area is an outdoor enthusiast's dream. Our market stretches from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the George Washington National Forest. Hiking, mountain biking, camping and fishing opportunities abound. Our town is a growing tourism destination with bustling downtown streets lined with Victorian architecture. Situated as we are amid a primarily rural area, we also offer a low cost of living and easy driving access to Charlottesville, Roanoke, Richmond and Washington, D.C.

Our circulation is 18,000 daily and 21,000 Sunday.

To apply for this position send, without delay, a letter, resume and 10-12 work samples to: David Fritz, executive editor, The News Leader, P.O. Box 59, Staunton, VA 24402-0059. (Overnights to 11 N. Central Ave., Staunton, VA 24401). You may also send to newsjobs@newsleader.com. We are a Gannett Newspaper and we value diversity.

 

Interesting that it would mention working a beat, but not say what that beat is.

 

This paper does (or did, a few years ago) staff University of Virginia football and basketball home games. They split those duties between the main writer and the sports editor. Not sure what the situation is now.

But the area's beautiful, and David Fritz is a cool guy. Not a lot to do in Staunton, but at least you're not too far from DC, Richmond and other places.

 

For a while the sports department was down to the SE, a desker who sometimes writes and a writer they had to share with the features desk. I think this position may be moving back to having one full-time sportswriter to go along with the other two in the department.

As for the beat, I can't imagine there is a truly defined one. Basically everybody shares everything. Like you'd expect of a paper this size and this far from a metro area, they focus on preps. Many of the gamers come from stringers and they try to have their staff writer focus on features and enterprise. As mentioned above, they usually staff home football and basketball games at UVa. They also hit most of the James Madison home games and travelled with the Dukes when they won the Division I-AA championship a couple of years ago. 

For such a small department they do a surprising amount of enterprise and will travel to do interesting features on hometown sports figures making it elsewhere. I've seen staff written stories with datelines from Washington, Charlotte, Chapel Hill and spring training down in Florida.

If you're interested in this job and want more info shoot me a PM. I don't work there, but have some insight.

 

Forgive me, I'm new: what falls under the "enterprise" umbrella? I've never heard the term.

 

Anything Gannett certainly does.

 

SVB, it generally refers to anything above and beyond your normal beat expectations, such as gamers, daily features, etc. So it would include in-depth packages, long-form features and investigative projects, among a few other things.

Jay, I'm not sure I catch ya. But from my time with Gannett there was a heavy emphasis on projects. We had quarterly reviews in which we were expected to complete at least one project, along with the standard Gannett measures: Mainstreaming, Moments of Life, Real Life, Real News, etc. I don't miss those reviews.

 

Ugh. I don't miss those reviews either. But I need a job.

 

Can you tell me more about these standard measures?

What is "mainstreaming"?

 

If you look around on the Internet I'm sure you can find some of this stuff. But if you're in newspapers you ought to know about mainstreaming.

It's the practice of including minority voices as sources in your everyday run-of-the-mill stories. Gannett started dictating it as policy to journalists some 20-odd years ago. And they're not the only chain that puts an emphasis on using minority sources, but they're the only one I've worked for so far that actually measured how often you did so.

Moments of Life and Real Life, Real News are more recent concoctions of the Gannett corporate news department. Both are about trying to capture more of what the average joe is doing as opposed to just the newsmakers. Moments of Life is supposed to be about universal experiences that many readers will relate to. So in sports it might mean a story about what it's like on prep team's cut day, or a feature from the stands during a big game. Stuff that's related to the game but not strictly about what's happening on the field. Real Life, Real News is about news that relates more closely to readers lives and in a lot of cases involves including reader reaction to some big news event -- that's why you'll see in some Gannett papers quoting of a booster or a season ticket holder in stories about a major change in an athletic program or team. Like mainstreaming, much of it is stuff other newspapers and chains are trying to do as well but Gannett has a system for tracking the stuff and fairly specific ways for carrying it out.

 

Fascinating.

Do people at Gannett grumble about the mainstreaming policy?

 

Is this paper Gannett? But yeah, all Gannett people do is complain. Not just on this board, but everywhere. Gannett employee = complainer.