My goal when creating Cincy Jungle over five years ago was to provide content, analysis, commentary and whatever my fantastically growing readership craved. Day and night we bust our humps to come up with conversation that we believe interests you and sometimes we accidentally write something that provokes thought. Because after all, if you're not there, then we're alone in a dark room with a cracks in the ceiling that allows drops of water to fall into a puddle in the darkest corner of the room.
That means we have to continue recruiting, searching the minor leagues and putting out calls for an application to join our little squad. To keep things fresh with new perspectives, fresh motivation, we need to keep searching for writers to write for the site, dedicated to giving you the best information they can.
Yes, that means we're looking for writers. We know that most of you have an opinion to share with the world. But the truth is, for each writer we successfully integrated, about five others have the air depress from their balloons, quickly finding out how hard it can be to keep a website running with evolving content, especially true right now during the offseason -- and a lockout during the offseason making it that much harder to stay motivated.
So could this be for you?
Join A Movement
One of the things about CincyJungle is that we're in the middle of a movement that's reflected in the numbers. We're beating mostly every Bengals-centric website except for Bengals.com and according to Alexa.com, our traffic numbers have been comparable to Enquirer.com (not the Bengals section, the entire website!). Do you know why? Because we feed the machine, an insatiable desire to our readers to crave more and more content; filling a void where others leave.
And during our continuous growth, CincyJungle has earned itself recognition as one of the top ten trafficked websites amongst all of the NFL blogs at SB Nation. We were a Reader's Choice Awards finalist for best team blog. We're partnered with sites like NationalFootballPost.com, Yahoo Sports!, Sports Illustrated and CBSSports.com while our stories are often featured on news aggregators like Google News. While monetary compensation isn't possible at this time, if you're looking at a possible career in the field -- maybe you're in college or as a hobby looking to see if a career change is for you -- CincyJungle could be used as a spring board to help you get noticed. If you're good and also consistent, you will get noticed.
But if you're interested, you need to consider the following as things we'll need from you.
- High Availability (including weekends): Our goal here is to have constant coverage for news, opinion and commentary. Since there's few of us to provide the constant coverage, we're looking for people that can help us out at least four days or more per week. The higher your availability, the better. This will be the second-most critical aspect that we need from our writers. The first?
- Strong Writing Skills: This goes without saying. But there are more questions you need to ask yourself. Can you find a quote, no larger than a single sentence and expand it into a full post? Are you able to provide a brief history on that player in less than 100 words? Can you expand a random thought into a full featured article?
- Strength In Searching For News: This is another one. Are you good at finding information that others can't? It might surprise you but a majority of our postings come from finding links and information we think our readers will enjoy. Our commentary generally shies away from the commentary offered in the original link. We like to add our own voice to the news being provided, often incorporating the player's history, the strength of the position that the player plays from and the overall impact on the team.
- Loyalty To Our Bottom Line: There's really only one thing to keep in mind, when pondering the overall goal for CincyJungle. We are a group of fans that maintain a Bengals site for the fans. And our goal is keep our readers entertained, occupied and most importantly informed.
- HTML Knowledge: We don't require you to do any page building, or do anything more than write. However, knowledge of HTML can make a post more aesthetically pleasing.
- Relation To The Bengals. Obviously we're not going to "hire" a writer that simply lacks Bengals knowledge. You have to have a strong knowledge of the team as it is today, along with a strong knowledge of the team's recent history.
If you're interested, email us the following at cincyjungle [at] gmail [dot] com:
Your name, your site screen name, previous blogs you've written for, general writing history, writing education, your availability and how do you think you could help CincyJungle.