Times of NW Indiana, Copy Editor/Enterprise Sports Writer

The Times of Northwest Indiana, a 90,000+ circulation newspaper located 30 miles from the heart of Chicago is seeking a professional, experienced Copy Editor/Enterprise Sports Writer to join our team. Responsibilities include the review of written materials, editing them to adhere to standards for style, proper grammar and spelling and page proofing. You will be expected to produce compelling feature/enterprise stories and cover local prep and other game assignments.

The successful candidate will be a team player who has a solid knowledge of grammar and AP style, strong headline writing and proofreading skills, solid news judgment and is proficient with computers. We prefer individuals with writing and editing experience at a newspaper or through education experience. The ability to communicate well in person, over the phone and on the Internet is also a must. A bachelor's degree (B.A. or B.S.) from a four year college or university is strongly preferred.

Interested candidates are invited to apply online.

Apply Online: www.nwi.com/timesjobs

 

Good paper and a good group of guys work there. The paper was a Top 10 daily APSE section last year, and I know they won a bunch of other APSE and state honors the past few years.

The paper does a good job of mixing coverage of Chicago pro sports, colleges in Indiana and dominating the local prep scene.

 

I've always been surprised that enterprise guys don't have job descriptions like this one.
A day or two a week on a desk could do wonders to help a guy like that know a little bit about every team. They'd immediately have a jumping off point as opposed to be the guy who swoops in from time to time.

 

You're not going to find too many people qualified and in-demand enough to do an enterprise job who would also be willing to work desk shifts.

 

I, too, thought it was an interesting combination of jobs ... especially at a 90K circulation paper.

It seems to me an enterprise writer would be better covering a little bit of everything. It would help finding those enterprise ideas. Hard to do while reading AP copy, writing headlines and cutlines and sizing photos.

 

Enterprise = GA?

 

I'm not sure of the size of the full-time staff, but I don't think it's as big as people might expect for a 90K circ. Hence the combo desk / reporting job. I was a correspondent (stringer) for them for a few months. There was at least one week where I covered three or four games and wrote a feature, and I know there were other correspondents who did the same.

 

This will be the first job gone when cuts come...

 

And it's probably the first one created by the last cuts, right? "Well, we're down a reporter, and a copy editor. Let's hire both, in the same person."

 

Is this the paper that fired someone for posting on SportsJournalists.com?

 

I agree that this is sort of weird. The people who I know who are good enterprise reporters and the people I know who are good copy editors are completely opposite animals.

I don't know anything about the job, but a red flag for me always goes up for any job that is something-slash-desk. I'd ask a lot of questions about how it works and what the percentages are. My fear is that as soon as somebody leaves or there are cuts, the enterprise part of the job is gone and they've chained your left leg to the desk.

 

If it's simply reading and proofing copy that sounds very compativle. If it's building pages and paginating, that's an entirely different animal.