Tyler Wombles has taken on several different roles over his career.
He started as a stringer for The Advocate and Democrat during his senior year of high school. He went to Tennessee to pursue a career in journalism, which included a stop into the basement with The Daily Beacon.
Wombles climbed the ladder at the student paper, beginning as a staff writer and ending as managing editor, with a stop as sports editor in the middle.
His senior year, he accepted a position as sports editor back at his hometown Advocate and Democrat. Soon after, he took a role as a cops and courts reporter at The Maryville Daily Times. He rose through the ranks as a sports reporter and is now the sports editor at The Daily Times.
Throughout his several stops along the way, the class of 2020 graduate has relied on what he learned as a student journalist at the Beacon.
“You’re really doing the job. You’re managing contributors and making a schedule and figuring out what’s going to get covered and writing yourself and editing,” Wombles said. “I mean, that’s exactly what I do now. I think it also just gives you confidence because I was able to walk into working at The Daily Times and I knew what to expect, even down to the content management system, Blox. We both use the same one.
“I had confidence in, ‘OK, this is how you not only write a story and edit a story, but this is how you manage people. This is how you do this type of thing.’ I just think it prepares you because you’re actually doing the job in itself.”
The journey for fellow Beacon alum Josh Lane was a lot more straightforward. Lane knew he wanted to work in sports, and he decided to work at the student television outlet as part of a requirement for his introduction to journalism class. The only catch was the outlet declined him.
Utilizing his backup plan, he sent an email to The Daily Beacon and was accepted. COVID-19 slowed down his journey, but he eventually worked his way up to sports editor of the student paper.
When The Daily Times had an opening during his senior year, Lane was able to call on his Beacon connections to get a foot in the door. He took the job just a few months before graduating. The paper has been a stomping ground for Beacon alumni, and Lane followed in their footsteps.
As Sports Editor at the Maryville Daily Times, Tyler Wombles credits his time at The Daily Beacon for helping him succeed in his career.
If it wasn’t for student media, Lane might not have had the connections to get the position at The Daily Times.
“These are what professionals who do this look like,” Lane said. “This is the stories they write and the questions they ask and all these things. And getting to meet them and interact with them, like all that stuff was so much more beneficial to me than sitting in a classroom. I mean, I definitely wouldn’t be where I am without my time in student media.”
Wombles and Lane are combining now to cover a wide variety of sports at The Daily Times. Uniquely positioned, the paper covers nine area high schools as well as Maryville College and University of Tennessee sports.
It’s a lot of work, and it keeps the pair and a network of freelance writers busy.
“There are a lot of organizations out there that say, ‘We cover this many schools or we do this,’ but it doesn’t necessarily mean they provide real deep coverage,” Wombles said. “We do, we go for it. We cover these schools that we cover. We typically cover every game that we can. We’re there consistently. It’s not just a hit and run and come back to them later. We’re there.”
Both Wombles and Lane utilized networking opportunities to get to the positions they’re at now. The experience of doing the job through college made the transition almost seamless.
Sitting in a press box with professional journalists led directly to job opportunities — something that isn’t possible with just attending classes.
“What are you doing if you’re not getting experience,” Lane said. “If you’re not making connections, if you’re not getting extra experience, if you’re not pushing yourself as a writer and as a reporter and trying to get better. No one’s going to want to hire you if you come in and it’s a resume that just says, ‘Hi, I went four years, but I did nothing with it.’ No one’s going to want to hire you.”
State of the media in Blount County
The industry is changing, and The Daily Times has been in the midst of that. The paper recently switched to using mail carriers to deliver the paper as opposed to the traditional contractor route.
The move has brought ire on social media, but it is a part of the change happening in the journalism industry. Wombles remembers his older colleagues telling him stories of how mad people were when they switched from an afternoon paper to a morning paper.
“It’s the nature of the business a little bit,” Wombles said. “I mean, people just don’t really like change, and you’re going to see that a lot of times, especially in a community where they’ve had a certain print schedule or expecting the newspaper to come out a certain time every day.”
They also recently went away from printing a Sunday paper but still put a product out on the other six days. There’s also been the transition to digital, which is about 50/50 at The Daily Times.
Many papers in the East Tennessee regions of Adams Publishing Group print just once weekly, but The Daily Times has had enough success to hold onto its print product. The circulation is around 12,000 for The Daily Times, Wombles estimated.
“If you do good work and good reporting — and I think we do we do good game coverages and everything — people are still going to care,” Lane said. “If you’re sitting there and twiddling your thumbs and not doing any good work and whatever, I don’t think people are going to care if the paper dies out. I think as long as long as your work speaks for yourself, people are going to be interested.”
Former Beacon sports editors Tyler Wombles and Josh Lane credit their success in local sports journalism to their experience working at The Daily Beacon.
