NJ.Com is looking for a Sixers writer.

Zack Rosenblatt used to do the gig, but he was moved over to the Eagles beat when Matt Lombardo ended up switching gears to cover the Giants instead.

Eliot Shorr-Parks recently went over to Sports Radio 94 WIP, so they’re down a dude and looking for a replacement, which doesn’t have to be a dude.

Here’s the job posting on Twitter via Sports Director Kevin Manahan:

My first thought was that this comes off as somewhat snarky and condescending. If you’re reading the job posting on Twitter, then obviously you’ve heard of Twitter, so I don’t know what that line was all about.

But I guess people are bagging Manahan because they’re viewing this as a full time job with part time pay, which I don’t think is necessarily true. He doesn’t even say how many hours a week this gig is or how much money you’d earn. I worked the Union beat on a “monthly stipend” and it wasn’t even close to being a 40-hour work week. You could very easily cover the Sixers on 20 hours a week if you’re just doing the home games and going to practices and shoot-around with a daily recap or column. Keith Pompey and Serena Winters are the two traveling reporters, and unless you’re REALLY into generic locker room quotes, then there really is no justification in schlepping anybody else around the country on expensive flights.

Speaking of which, the line that does kind of annoy me is when Manahan talks about travel only being involved if the candidate can prove they’re “worth the investment.” I mean, if you just hire the right person in the first place, then  theoretically they shouldn’t have to prove shit, right? This makes it sound like there’s some probationary period where you have to actually show that you know what you’re doing, but if that’s the case, then maybe don’t hire that person in the first place.

Either way, sports writing is not some ultra-important discipline that is necessary for the greater societal good. If all of us were in a terrible snowstorm, the sports writers would be able to go home and relax while the police officers and EMTs stayed on duty, since they are mandatory personnel. We are not. If this was “The Walking Dead,” which jumped the shark three seasons ago, we would the most useless members of Alexandria, the Hilltop, or the Sanctuary. We would be nothing more than grunts with no real-world engineering or carpentry or metalworking skills.

This is what sports writing is. It’s about taking whatever opportunity you get and turning it into something. I started out on $26,300 working graveyard shift in the Bible Belt, so compared to that, a monthly stipend covering the Sixers as a part time gig doesn’t sound all that bad. It’s America, ya know? It’s a free market, capitalist country. If 10,000 people bitch and whine at Kevin Manahan on Twitter, at least one person will take that job and work their ass off and turn it into something bigger and better. And you’ll still be sitting here complaining while that person is ready to cash in with a new gig.

If we’re really concerned about being bullshitted out of decent-paying jobs as sports people, then maybe the onus is on us to take a step back and look at our overall value and how we can improve it. Can we explore different revenue models and find a way to better monetize our content? There’s always a lot of crying and complaining without the requisite introspection, which is how I’d describe Jim Acosta’s last two years at CNN.

Manahan just needs to lay off the “basement” stereotype, because I know a lot of non-credentialed bloggers who do a better job at covering certain teams than some of the washed up jabronies who have been phoning it in for years on their various beats.

Time’s yours.