Football tab thread 2012

Our 48-page high school tab sailed without significant incident. It's the first time I can remember sending the whole thing to plate more than 24 hours in advance of the actual press time.

Our 24-page college preview tab is about half finished. I'll tinker around the edges on it Monday night if we're not too busy, then close it Tuesday night if possible.

 

We did, again, zoned tabs, so a total of 36 pages with nine high schools and one college. It wasn't bad.

The zoning is as much about as advertising as it is content. Ads are one of the reasons why the tabs haven't been dumped in favor of a glossy magazine that would serve all the zones.

Both were done on time but the biggest problem was the geniuses in backshop were having a problem with pages running through the rip as broadsheets instead of tab sized. Turns out, they had forgotten to throw the switch to send them as tab pages, so after a couple of hours of troubleshooting and resending, they realized the problem was on their end.

Geniuses!

As for ad sales, I understand why some places don't want to mess with them because either a) the ad sales aren't new money and just shuffling from one pile to the other or b) they might make money on paper but when you take out printing costs, production costs, editorial costs and ad rep commissions, it is a net loss or c) ad buyers in your area may not give a shit about football.

 

Our's went to press Monday, 148 pages (including glossy cover) at 10x10. We cover about 80 teams (70+ high schools, five colleges and a juco). I don't know what the final ad count was, but we had about two dozen full-page ads.

 

Pressboxer,

I'm curious. You say you cover 80 teams. How many people are doing that covering?

I've done tabs before and know how hard it was just to get the basic information (last season's stats, accurate classifications, coaches claiming not to have anything resembling a depth chart, etc.). I can't imagine doing that for that many schools. Or writing a separate story for each one. How in-depth do you go on each school? Full rosters? Stats? Full stories?

Seems its tough enough with 12 teams keeping track of who plays for who. What's your formula?

 

Hell, it took going to a school, calling four straight days (including weekends to the coach's cell) and then calling the school again on the first day to get a roster from one of our schools. Were the numbers and/or class? Nope.

I have 4 schools, but we do volleyball and XC in the tab as well.

 

We have four full-time writers on staff. Three cover a local high school and a college, the fourth handles the area beat of 70+ high schools. We also have a handful of stringers and sister papers to the north and south with which we overlap on maybe a dozen high schools. This means we'll have 6-8 bylined gamers every Friday.

Our area guy starts sending out questionnaires in late April-early May and we generally get the bulk of them (60+ this year) returned by the end of the school year. The snag is when schools change coaches after questionnaires are sent in. We had half a dozen or so such cases this year.

Our previews consist of a team capsule with the coach's name and record (overall and at school if possible), last season's record and district finish, last district championship/playoff appearance, number of returning lettermen/starter, base offense and defense, and a list of players to watch with height, weight, class and position (we do not run full rosters, but some of the smaller schools can almost get their entire roster listed).

All that is in addition to a 12-inch story with a couple of player mugs. The stories generally focus on one area -- rebuilding after a bad season, continuing momentum after a playoff run, new coach taking over, superstud returning to continue assault on the record book, etc. -- but there can be a little overlap. We'll include stats on returning players in the story.

Most of our interviewing and writing is done in July and the preliminary deadline comes before teams begin practice. We'll split the area schools among the staff. The area guy does about half and the rest of the staff do about a dozen each.

The first week of practice, photographers hit the road to get mugs and team shots. Because our biggest schools start a week later (they get to have 18 workouts in pads in May), they're the last ones we shoot. This year, almost everything was ready to go on Friday, but we had to wait for the last big school to do its photo day Saturday morning. By Saturday afternoon, the presses were rolling.

 

Damn. That is really, really, really good. Hats off to you. None of the places I am familiar with ever had that kind of manpower, so different world. 6-8 bylined stories every week? Yikes, how big is your newshole?

So it sounds like you have 3-4 guys who make putting the legwork into this their full-time gig during the summer. That makes sense if one can afford the manpower to do it that way. (Wasn't sure if you meant 4 writers TOTAL on staff or 4 writers devoted to high schools and colleges on staff, in which case I assume you're a fairly large metro.)

I can't imagine trying to stay up on what's happening with that many different schools. Coaching changes, injuries, etc. Every team has a story to tell and it's easy to get overwhelmed with who's who pretty quickly.

 

We stopped doing our prep tab a handful of years ago. We still do a 60-page college tab.

Anyone have links or PDFs of your tabs? Always looking for good ideas for themes, breakouts, etc., for our daily run.

 

Our tab is making money this year for the first time since Jordin Sparks won Idol. Thanks to the flagship school actually being good and selling beaucoup ads.

 

Eight centerpieces over two weeks, just barely!

Our push started around the first of the month, and we knew one of our outlying schools had a new coach (which seems to be an annual thing). Just to be safe, I scheduled them last, yet the staff chose to delay contacting this school until the last minute. I think he figured on getting a number from another of our coaches that has this school scheduled, but as of late last week, no luck. I urged contacting the principal or other coaches at the school, but got met by a series of excuses (uh, phone calls and emails do not come out of your pay).

Finally, he sent an email to the AD a couple of days before the story was scheduled to run and, while they didn't get CP treatment, I stripped the story and their info box across the top and it still had a big time look. So my question is, I guess, if you know you've got a noob at a school, how to get reporters to attack them early and keep what hair I've got left its natural color instead of gathering all the easy hits first?

 

Interesting way to note how long it's been.

 

Anyone up for doing an exchange this year?