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Neill Woelk taking over for BG Brooks on cubuffs.com

Buffnik

Real name isn't Nik
Club Member
Junta Member
Long rumored. Just posted by Adam. Fantastic news (with all due respect to BG, who was great).

Press release from CU:

BOULDER — Neill Woelk, a veteran journalist of 35 years with many ties to the University of Colorado and Boulder communities, has been named the new contributing editor for the school’s website, CUBuffs.com.

He replaces B.G. Brooks, who is retiring from the full-time position he has held for the last six years. He will remain in a part-time capacity writing select feature stories and on game days, mostly in football and basketball.

Woelk is known to many around the Boulder-Denver metro area for his longtime work with the Boulder Daily Camera, as over the course of 30 years with the newspaper, he was a sports reporter and columnist, an assistant sports editor under the late Dan Creedon, and finally serving as sports editor himself before moving on to become the editor of the Hermiston (Ore.) Herald. After one year working for theSt. George Spectrum in southwest Utah, he most recently has been working as the journalism advisor for student media at Colorado State University.

A 1982 CU graduate with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism, he grew up in Lamar where he worked for two former CU Board or Regents members in high school. He was the state of Colorado’s sportswriter of the year in 1999 and has received numerous Colorado Press Association awards for his work.

“The University of Colorado has been part of the fabric of my life for most of my life,” Woelk said. “I am extremely excited to take on this new chapter and be part of an athletic department I believe is headed in the right direction and is ready to accomplish some great things. I can’t wait to start.”

Woelk will officially begin next week and will write for the first time from the Pac-12 Football Media Day events in Los Angeles on July 30.

Brooks joined the CU staff in the summer of 2009 as one of the first former longtime beat writers to transition to working for a college or professional team website. He was one of many experienced reporters left out of work when the Rocky Mountain News ceased operations on February 28 of that year.

“The past six years working at the school that I covered for so many, many more has been an enlightening, enjoyable experience from a different perspective,” Brooks said. “Newspaper friends said I was moving to the ‘dark side.’ It was quite to the contrary. People make the difference at CU, and I met so many dedicated folks I will consider lifetime friends. Many thanks to Dave Plati and the athletic department administration for giving me an opportunity when times appeared bleak six winters ago.”

“Neill has some fresh new ideas to help populate both the website and our social media outlets and has often referred to working for CU, his alma mater, as his dream job,” CU athletic director Rick George said. “At the Camera, at one time or another he covered all of our sports and thus has a great familiarity with our program. B.G. will remain with us on a part-time basis and still write occasional feature stories and on select game days; having the 1-2 punch of Neill and B.G. will take our own coverage of our program to another level.”
 
This is great, great news! Neil is informative and entertaining. It will be interesting to see how he does, since he'll be expected to toe the party line, as an AD employee.
 
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I have high hopes that with Neill running the website that CU (with what's already going on in video) will have the best sports media in the nation.
 
I always have loved reading what Woelk had to say about the Buffs. Sure, as an AD employee he will not be too critical, but I thought he always saw the positive side anyway. I'm happy with this move.
 
Woelk is more of a cheerleader... The career path for [MENTION=2679]RK[/MENTION] has never been clearer
 
This is a great move by the AD. Look forward to reading his take on things and getting some fresh changes to the site and social media channels.
 
hiring talent that would not otherwise be available to us (absent all the pressure on the newspaper business) is great. when you can't count on friendly treatment from your local rags and some are downright hostile (**** you jizzla and hendo-perv, retired), you have to do something to create your own favorable coverage.

welcome aboard woelk.
 
Woelk knew how to criticize and question things when he thought necessary, and genuinely loves the Buffs. Always liked him.
 
Good news. Neill often had a challenging task when trying to cover the Buffs during the scandal. Trying to remain objective when most of your colleagues in the industry were in a feeding frenzy had to be difficult. I hope this is a good spot for him and he's here for a long time.

Is it my imagination or are things just starting to work again?
 
Good news. Neill often had a challenging task when trying to cover the Buffs during the scandal. Trying to remain objective when most of your colleagues in the industry were in a feeding frenzy had to be difficult. I hope this is a good spot for him and he's here for a long time.

Is it my imagination or are things just starting to work again?

I think Woelk was the only journalist Bruce Plaskett said anything good about in his book.
 
Congrats Neill. He always seemed like a bit of a sunshine pumper to me so this should be a perfect gig. Whether or not I agreed with him, his articles were at the very least, entertaining and well written.
 
I'd prefer he worked for The Denver Post. Not that I am not glad to see him back reporting on the Buffs in any capacity.
 
It's a good move for Neill because he's familiar with the Buffs, gets to stay in the area, and can retire without getting screwed by the print media biz. It will be sad that it takes away a rare good one from the ranks of the working media assigned to cover the Buffs, but since B.G. has been leaning toward full retirement for years it was good timing that this lined up.
 
I'm excited by this. I always enjoyed Neil's articles with the DC back in the day.

On a side note, the decimation of our newspaper industry is leaving some great talent in its wake. I hope Neil finds satisfaction in this new gig and moving out of what is about to become a wasteland.
 
I liked BG hope he was not forced out. Neil is very good and cares about the program.
 
Neill is awesome, one of my favorite people to see around CU events, super happy for him.
BG is equally as awesome, sitting next to him for the past two basketball seasons has been awesome, really cool to learn and just hear stories from an old school journalist.
 
I liked BG hope he was not forced out. Neil is very good and cares about the program.

The article said B.G. is staying on to write feature stories on game day for football and basketball. Go to games and get paid to do something you love without the baggage that comes with full time employment, sounds like a nice retirement gig.
 
The article said B.G. is staying on to write feature stories on game day for football and basketball. Go to games and get paid to do something you love without the baggage that comes with full time employment, sounds like a nice retirement gig.
If I could cherry pick the favorite parts of my job and do it for a few years once I stopped a full time gig, I would jump at it. Good for BG (and all of us).
 
This is the future of sports journalism. The days of newspaper sports columnists are numbered.
 
Woelk is more of a cheerleader... The career path for @RK has never been clearer

For some strange reason, cheerleader types get more insight into what players, officials and coaches are thinking.......funny how that works!

Woelk learned from the best, Dan Creedon. Good to see Dan's legacy continue in Boulder.
 
This is the future of sports journalism. The days of newspaper sports columnists are numbered.


Oh noes! What will wuthless midget sh*ts like Kizla do for a living? Wash jocks instead of sniffing them ?

Well, Kiz can always be a bag man. He's got experience shuffling through other people' property!
 
When a college or pro team can control it's message better by hiring in-house sports writers, the need for dip*****s like Mark Jizla goes away. With subscriber, advertising and circulation numbers falling every year, mega-papers like the Denver Post don't have the capacity to continue covering local sports the way they used to - especially if fans of the local teams are getting their news directly from the source.

Gee, I really feel bad for Jizla.
 
When a college or pro team can control it's message better by hiring in-house sports writers, the need for dip*****s like Mark Jizla goes away. With subscriber, advertising and circulation numbers falling every year, mega-papers like the Denver Post don't have the capacity to continue covering local sports the way they used to - especially if fans of the local teams are getting their news directly from the source.

Gee, I really feel bad for Jizla.

While I agree with you on a certain level, I don't think there will ever be a time where people get all their news from in-house writers. There has to be someone out there to write the negative piece when it needs to be written. It definitely doesn't need to be that dude at the Denver Post though.
 
For some strange reason, cheerleader types get more insight into what players, officials and coaches are thinking.......funny how that works!

Because they're hot, flexible, and wear short skirts. Not that far fetched...


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
 
While I agree with you on a certain level, I don't think there will ever be a time where people get all their news from in-house writers. There has to be someone out there to write the negative piece when it needs to be written. It definitely doesn't need to be that dude at the Denver Post though.

It won't be all from in-house writers. It'll come from a combination of in-house writers, websites like this one, and electronic media. The negative pieces will come from websites and electronic media outlets. We can be downright brutal here, but we're invested in the program. So when we're critical, it's not meant to tear down the program. When Hendo-perv or Jizla writes something, it's meant to undermine the program.
 
While I agree with you on a certain level, I don't think there will ever be a time where people get all their news from in-house writers. There has to be someone out there to write the negative piece when it needs to be written. It definitely doesn't need to be that dude at the Denver Post though.

I posted something in the Pub about the writer from the Pittsburgh Gazette starting his own site. Made a lot of sense and I think that's where it is going. Independent voices.

One of the most poignant things he said about newspapers (which I relate to as an outsider looking at it as a business person) is when he talked about how someone like Bill Gates would react when he heard that 40% of the paper's readership was due to the Steelers and saw a staff meeting with 300 journalists working for the paper... "Which 40% of you write about the Steelers?". That's the problem. And that's why independent voices for sports work: you're taking the most (only?) profitable part of the newspaper's organization and only focusing on that.
 
It won't be all from in-house writers. It'll come from a combination of in-house writers, websites like this one, and electronic media. The negative pieces will come from websites and electronic media outlets. We can be downright brutal here, but we're invested in the program. So when we're critical, it's not meant to tear down the program. When Hendo-perv or Jizla writes something, it's meant to undermine the program.

I posted something in the Pub about the writer from the Pittsburgh Gazette starting his own site. Made a lot of sense and I think that's where it is going. Independent voices.

One of the most poignant things he said about newspapers (which I relate to as an outsider looking at it as a business person) is when he talked about how someone like Bill Gates would react when he heard that 40% of the paper's readership was due to the Steelers and saw a staff meeting with 300 journalists working for the paper... "Which 40% of you write about the Steelers?". That's the problem. And that's why independent voices for sports work: you're taking the most (only?) profitable part of the newspaper's organization and only focusing on that.

Totally agree with both of you. And while it's kinda sad to see newspapers dying, I also think the online medium is awesome. I love the fact that everybody has a voice rather than the one guy who writes about the team for the paper. It forces everybody to be better, and those who aren't willing to do that get left behind quickly, better content for everyone.
 
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