UNC beat writer - The (Durham) Herald-Sun

Since all design and copy editing is done at a Paxson hub in Kentucky, the desk work likely involves taking prep calls.

You can count on covering every UNC women's basketball home game in addition to UNC men's basketball, and likely cover high school basketball. Definitely a lot of stringers used, including folks who The Herald-Sun laid off.

Contrast that to The Herald-Sun's competition at Raleigh paper: Its UNC beat writer never covers women's basketball (interestingly, the stringer the N&O uses a lot to cover women's basketball was laid off by Herald-Sun), he never has to cover high school sports or take prep calls. He actually has time for enterprise. The poor Herald-Sun writers are scrambling so much, they have little time for features.

They cover the Durham Bulls by committee.

The staff has been reduced so much that they are about to move (you can't make this up) into the second floor and part of the third floor of a bank building across from a mall.

 

Be ready for the Kentucky-based copy desk to confuse UNC for Duke in the headlines over your stories. A cardinal sin around here.

I live in Durham and rarely pick up the Herald. They recently raised the newsstand price to $1 and gave subscribers a corresponding rate hike. Several of my 60-something and 70-something neighbors who have been daily subscribers for decades finally threw in the towel.

Unless you're hellbent on being in the Triangle, this is a big stay away.

 

Sad. That used to be a tremendous newspaper and the Paxtons ruined it. But then again they ruin all their newspapers.

 

I remember it being a pretty damn good section in the late 1990s and early 2000s, basically the time when Amato had almost this exact gig.

 

Yeah, it used to be very competitive with all the metros in the state when it came to sports in the Triangle. Seven or eight years ago when I was working for another publication in town I would have been going after this one hard. Yesterday I mentioned the opening to my wife who said "You wouldn't actually apply for that, would you?"

 

They had a fantastic columnist in Frank Dascenzo, a Pittsburgh native, who retired several years ago.

 

The stories Frank would tell in the press room were better than his columns, and I don't mean that as a knock on his columns. The Herald-Sun also had great beat writers working the three ACC schools and Mike Potter was an absolute workhorse doing Hurricanes, Bulls, NC Central and whatever else they asked of him.

I always liked them because they didn't have the resources of the N&O, but more than held their own.

 

Then the family that owned the paper basically conned Paxton into paying $100 mil for the paper, and it went all to shit as soon as the signature was on the sales agreement ...

 

...followed by the Monday massacre in which scads of staffers were fired and immediately escorted out of the building.

 

I'm told that there have had 76 people apply so far.

 

That isn't the same gig as it is now. At that time, Jim Furlong covered non-revenue sports, college beat writers rarely had to cover high school sports, desk shifts were rare and they didn't cover Durham Bulls games. Now college beat writers have to cover high school sports, cover virtually every UNC and Duke home women's basketball game and pitch in on Bulls coverage since there is no Bulls beat writer.

 

They've already mistaken N.C. State for N.C. Central ...