Football tab thread 2012

Han, what do you usually do with writers who ignore something you assign? Seems like linking the task to continued receipt of a paycheck should do the trick.

 

Finished ours on Thursday. Two tab sections; one 44 pages for high school, the other 32 pages for college.

Did a lot of things the same I did the year before -- high school, college and pro capsules especially -- because I can't think of a better way to do them.

The high school capsules are half-page where we rank eight categories and come up with a team power rating. 48 of them this year.

The Big Ten capsules and top 25 capsules are written by David Jones, a pretty good columnist. They're always quite readable. Eight pages in all.

And our 32 NFL capsules, we have an accompanying player cutout with each one. Eight pages, one a division.

Was able to amp it up for the state blue-chip centerspread, the "divisional" HS cover pages and the high school cover story. Our design editor picked up the two covers and made them extremely kick-ass.

I'm pretty happy with it. It hits the streets tomorrow morning. And I'm up for the exchange if anyone has the energy to handle it.

 

6-7 pages per school? That's a helluva lot of information

 

Or, I might hope, a hell of a lot of ads.

 

Sometimes these things can be editorial-driven rather than ad-driven.

 

Where? Where?

All I ever heard was "we can't sell it".

 

Our photogs are going to be doing two-a-days all week to get the football tab done. They will not like me very much.

Maybe now the powers that be will realize why we should've scaled back to our true coverage area. Unless, somehow, the communities farther away from the office -- some too far to even get the paper delivered -- bought ads.

 

Well, here for one. I know there are others.

Fact is, when we got to a certain number of ads, I told them I needed four more pages on one of the sections. And I had four more pages. That's editorial-driven.

 

One of our ad sales people told me how she's tried to get circulation to overprint ours so she could take copies to the schools...schools take it home, more visibility and more people wanting to buy ads. Our circulation guy wouldn't have any of it. We asked him once about setting up a subscription table at a highly attended local basketball tournament. He said "great, I'll get you some papers." I said "are you going to write while my reporters sell?"
'"Well all my distributors are on contract. I can't ask them to give up time."
"I was talking about YOU. "
No response.

 

We did this anyway at my last shop, even with a tab. We covered seven high schools - once practices started, each team would be previewed weekly leading up to the preview tab. Of course, the story angles were different and varied and never repeated. We always found enough storylines to warrant a team to have about 3 weekly stories and its tab preview.

 

We do an all-fall sports tab, not solely football, thought that might be an interesting option in the future. Focus on between 5-8 schools in a roughly 10-12 school coverage area. That's partially why the tab is only eight pages; other reasons probably include we have a sister paper 8 miles away that puts out a 48-page fall sports section (covering four schools, all sports) and the fact our advertisers can't seem to sell anything ever.
Biggest gripe this year: Someone forgot to change the insert schedule and the tabs didn't come out for the first Friday night football game. They were in the paper the day after. That kinda upset, well, the entire department of three.

 

The only thing more exciting than piloting a MEDEVAC mission is a Friday night on the desk.

Man, I miss that, sometimes.