Sports reporter, The Associated Press, Detroit

Trister's departure from Little Rock has created an opening in Arkansas but it won't be based in Little Rock, as it has for the last five decades and probably beyond.
Instead the writer will be based in Fayetteville and will almost entirely cover University of Arkansas sports.
AP has talked for years about having a person who did sports and also some business coverage, mostly Wal-Mart, but I don't know if that will be the case for this job.

 

Yes, he applied and was one of something like a dozen interviewed.

Nothing against Trister, whom AP's had cover the Olympics, but this gig should have been Hogg's hands down. I feel terrible for him, although I've heard his AP workload won't go down too much.

 

The move makes perfect business sense for AP. Trister was on AP's travel team for both Beijing and Vancouver, and this moves him into a bigger market, plus it probably makes the move to Fayetteville easier.

Hogg's been covering hundreds of events a year since Harry Atkins first hired him as a stringer 100 years ago, and this leaves him in that position.

 

Just like plenty of newspapers that pass on the old reliable stringer for full-time openings because a good stringer can take years to find.

 

Business sense doesn't always make things right. And sadly, Stitch is correct.

 

My understanding is that while the job will technically be Detroit, Trister will be based around Ann Arbor and will focus on Michigan and Michigan State

 

The job will almost certainly include MSU football and UM basketball, but also splitting Tigers and Lions with Lage and being #1 on the Pistons, so there's no reason to have him based in Ann Arbor. Lage already lives there.

 

Quite true. I'm not saying I agree with the decision, just that it is easy to see their thinking.