Wednesday, November 23, 2005

Q: I recently had two reporting job offers (my first offers!), both from about 20,000 circulation newspapers. However, the difference in staff size was very noticeable--one paper had more than twice the number of reporters as the other, and at the better-staffed paper there seemed to be a greater investment in overall quality (technology, photo reproduction quality, etc.). On the other hand, the paper with fewer reporters seemed to be located in a much newsier area, or at least there seemed to be a large amount of breaking news. The better-staffed paper seemed to be in a town that had less going on.

I thought the editors at both places were very good, and morale seemed high at both places. I thought the quality of writing and reporting was strong at both papers, although story length was noticeably shorter at the paper with fewer reporters.

Basically, the question seemed to me to boil down to picking between the better paper or the newsier town. There were a few other factors that influenced my decision a little bit (such as pay), but which would you have chosen?

Just curious

A: Great question, and you've done some great work evaluating your choices.

I like the way you think.

I've turned this over in my head a couple of times and I keep coming up with the same answer: work for the better newspaper.

We get better faster when we work with better people.

Working at a slack paper in a newsy town can even hurt you if your clips show that you are not taking full advantage of your opportunities.

Quality leads to quality.

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