Golden State of Mind is looking for passionate Golden State Warriors fans to join our team and help us with the daily work of offering our thoughts on the team we love while others look at them as a villainous super team.
Similar to last year, I like the direction our team is headed in right now so we're certainly not in a place of dire need for writers, but I'm always interested in identifying new voices to the team who can make unique contributions to the community.
So if you're eagerly searching for a public outlet to share your thoughts about the Warriors and support from a team of people while doing so, read on to find out how to apply.
Who we're looking for:
- Passionate Warriors fans who already spend time on social media keeping up with daily news about the team.
- Fans with strong opinions, a sense of humor and unique perspectives about the team, which they are able to express effectively and defend persuasively in writing.
- Clear thinkers with the ability to identify significant stories, synthesize information quickly, and concisely articulate the impact of news events on the team.
- Emerging writers who want greater exposure for their work and take genuine pride in their writing and ideas.
- Team players who want to contribute to the continued growth and improvement of Golden State of Mind.
- Community members interested in making Golden State of Mind a more inclusive place for minorities, women, and people of all cultures, religions, and sexual orientation.
What we're looking for:
- Copy editing
- Multimedia/social media skills
- Daytime short form news updates
- Gameday coverage (e.g. previews, recaps, highlights)
- Analytics (e.g. data analysis, advanced stats, and data visualization)
- Analysis/commentary about the ins and outs of the S.F. arena project
(In other words, anything at all that you believe would help Warriors fans in sharing their enthusiasm with others through what they read on this site. The more creative you are in sharing your love for the Warriors, the better.)
How to apply
1. Tell me about yourself: Send me an email stating your interest in joining the GSoM team, including the following three things:
- Make the subject line: "GSoM application: [your last name]"
- Describe how you will contribute to making the GSoM team more successful based on what you know about our site/staff.
- Describe what you hope to gain from joining the GSoM team.
(1a. If you're already an active member of our community, please include your user name as well so I know who you are and can review your genius comments of the past. And if you've previously written FanPosts here, definitely let me know so I can look back at those.)
2. Show me a writing sample: I always get a lot of really strong applicants, so writing samples always go a long way in sorting out who I might to add to our team. You have two options for writing samples:
- Send me links to 2-3 of published writing samples about the Warriors that represent the type of contributions you imagine yourself making to GSoM. Those samples could be published work about the Warriors at another blog/site OR FanPosts you've written here at GSoM. Either way, please try to pick articles about the Warriors that actually resemble what you'd like to contribute to GSoM.
OR
-
Attach a brief written response to the following question: "As a Warriors fan, how do you feel about the move to San Francisco?"
(If you have writing samples that are not about the Warriors that illustrate more about your writing ability/style, feel free to send them along with the response to the question above — it's always interesting to see the breadth of one's writing ability, but it doesn't help me if I don't know how you think about the Warriors.)
3. Let me know where to find you on social media: If you have a presence on Twitter already, please let me know so I can check it out. If you don't have one, I definitely won't judge you — I'm not nearly old enough to have witnessed the 1975 Warriors title run, but am just old enough to be a Neo-Luddite who only got on Twitter at SB Nation's suggestion.
4. Should you send a resume? Every year I do this, people send me resumes, which is a great practice for any job search. Yet, while I don't believe that resumes are entirely useless for searching for jobs generally, for this particular situation I do agree with Aline Lerner's point that, "Very smart people, who are otherwise fantastic writers, seem to check every ounce of intuition and personality at the door and churn out soulless documents."
Yikes! That doesn't sound too helpful for someone looking for writers!
If you believe that sending a resume will do a better job of illustrating something you've said about yourself in Step 1 above, feel free to send it along (if you have a super-duper 21st century video resume, definitely send it — we'd love to see your creativity!). But you won't be penalized for withholding a staler version of yourself — I'm obviously looking for more than that.
When we want to complete the process
The deadline to submit an application is 9 a.m. PST on August 5, 2016. I will respond to everyone who applies shortly after that date about my decision and/or next steps.
Of course, we'd love to find people who listened closely to all of their elementary school teachers' sentence diagramming lessons and write pristine prose, but what we really want to see is passion, (tasteful) humor, and an ability to organize and defend ideas. There are no right answers or expectations of needing to be optimistic or pessimistic about the team (you've probably noticed that our current staff runs the gamut in that regard), but creativity and style is certainly preferred.
As stated in the official SB Nation application, these positions are unpaid but provide opportunities for exposure and advancement if the talent and desire is there.
If you've come this far, thanks for considering this and I hope you apply! But even if you don't want to frequently contribute to GSoM but have thoughts you want to share, you're always free to voice your opinions in a FanPost — there's always plenty to discuss about the Warriors and we want to make this a space that encourages the free flow of ideas about the team.