High School Sports Reporter
About The Position
The East Bay Times is seeking a high school sports beat writer. We are looking for a talented sports journalist who can provide quick game analysis as well as deep-dive enterprise reporting suitable for our digital and print platforms. Our journalists work in real time, publishing around the clock for our online and daily newspaper readers. A large part of this job will be familiarizing yourself with the top teams and coaches in our coverage area and providing regularly scheduled content such as rankings, athlete-of-the-week candidates, roundups, and previews – proven winners for us on the metrics scale. Football is our primary focus from late summer through the early winter. It drives pageviews and subscriptions like nothing else on the high school beat. During football season, we give our readers something new every day in time for our morning newsletter. In the winter, we mostly cover basketball and soccer. In the spring, we cover sports such as baseball, softball and track and field. This beat also offers opportunities for enterprise stories and in-depth features that reach broad audiences, as well as roles beyond the high school beat, including professional and college sports assignments.
Requirements
- Knowledge of a variety of prep sports – football, basketball, baseball, softball, track and field, etc.
- Previous experience as a working journalist (college media experience is OK).
- Strong writing and grammatical skills under deadline pressure
- Working knowledge of the Associated Press stylebook
- Proficiency with social media for reporting and sharing stories
- Solid sports news judgment.
- Excellent communication skills regardless of the platform (i.e. in-person, Slack, Zoom/Google Meet, email, texts, etc.)
- Attention to detail and organization
- Additional language skills are a plus
Responsibilities
- Provide concise, accurate game coverage
- Write analysis that tells readers more than who scored and won
- Produce compelling enterprise stories
- Generate regular weekly content that readers will come to rely on, such as weekly rankings, roundups, and athlete of the week
- Regularly work nights and weekends.
- Build relationships with schools to secure exclusive content and/or breaking news
- Communicate with your supervisor and colleagues regularly
- Monitor your metrics and adjust your audience engagement strategy as needed
- Meet deadlines and juggle multiple stories of varying complexity
- Find and develop sources within the organizations
- Work harmoniously with other departments (i.e. audience, photo and print production teams)
- Complete field assignments in Contra Costa and Alameda County
Benefits
- medical
- dental
- life and disability insurance
- 401k
- paid time off
- select paid holidays
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Entry Level
Education Level
High school or GED
