Fall preview tabs...anyone else still doing them?

I'll be curious to see the changes from last year's thread: Football tabs

My shop hasn't done it for four years now, and I sure haven't missed it. Like Spartan Squad, basically the content we would have wrote for the preview gets spread out over August before the first regular season games. It makes life easier.

Though we've went to a design hub since we last did the tab, so if we still did it, my SE and I may have gotten away with not having to lay the thing out, which was the real chore. My paper still does a few other special sections throughout the year, some of we have to lay out, some the hub does.

I looked around last year after I started that thread, and there are only two papers in our surrounding counties (out of over 10) that still produce tabs. I'm pretty sure every paper was still doing them as recently as 2010. I've got the PDFs bookmarked from last year: one was a 12-page broadsheet with 16 ads (none large than a bottom-page banner) and the other was a 16-page tabloid-size with 12 banner ads and one full-page.

 

We do a 56-page high school tab (we have 30 football-playing schools in our coverage area) and it is very well received. Problem is, our ad department really doesn't try to sell it.
We'll have a 40-page college preview in a few weeks.
Our stuff now goes to a design hub and it has been a bigger pain on the front end than when the desk was in-house.

 

We have a design hub but they won't take special sections. Sports staff doesn't have enough bodies to write, do layout, plus put out the daily paper. I have to dip into the freelance budget to get it done.

 

I thought it was crazy to do a football or basketball special section/tab unless you had the advertising to pay for it (and not shuffled over from the daily ads).

If you can sell it, great.

If not, why not take that content and spread it out in the daily sports section over a week or so and promote it?

That way maybe you sell some extra papers and firm up the belief in the readers' minds that there's good stuff in the paper all the time.

 

At the last shop I worked that did tabs, the ad side's argument was "but rhey have great shelf life."

 

Do they really think many people keep the section through the entire sports season? The only ones doing that are we sportswriters, for use in deciphering names during the year.

At best, the page discussing Junior's team gets torn out and saved for a scrapbook.

 

Yes. I kept it around not only for rosters, but schedules as well, since preps wasn't my primary beat.

The ad side there was an odd place. Then, before CIF added playoff, we knew we could work up until Labor Day weekend. One ad manager, or so I'm told, wanted it out by then "because that's when the pros start." The SE looked at him and said "Pros?"

Another time they were launching an entertainment tab. Some genius though it would be great to run house ads proclaiming "Read The Entertainer. Look who's advertising in it!" Wouldn't it be more effective to talk about what's in it? Because just the other day I said "The heck with movie times and the club calendar, I wanna see what's on sale at Podunk TV and Stereo."

 

I have a feeling that this year, it will be what we call "pages within." It will be it's own part of the paper, but it might be pages 8A-12A versus being a separate section. It happened last year with basketball although you could pull out those four pages and keep them together.

 

Our tab has been getting downsized every year as we deal with staff cuts and other silliness. I came back from a one-week vacation (the only one I'll probably get to take this year, as I generally leave two weeks on the table every year... sigh) and was told that our tab was going to just be seven feature stories on each high school football league instead of seven feature stories and stories and capsules on all 55 teams in our coverage area.

I said if that was the case we should just move them inside the section and run them over a week, but I was told we were locked in to doing the tab because advertising was counting on it. I laughed to myself because our spring all-star issue had no ads. The ad spots were all filled with house ads. But if they're optimistic, I will be a team player again.

I argued to include the team writeups, since we'd get killed if that was the only thing in the tab and they relented into trimming the fringe schools from our tab and focus on the 25 cities and towns we sell the most papers in. Which will be great when I explain to the handful of coaches who don't get the writeups, but wonder why we ask them to call their games and stats in each week.

Very sobering.

 

With about a month until kickoff, our tab is finally official.

Like BigJim5190, we're cutting back the coverage area because of yet another regional realignment. (It actually makes logical sense!) When I originally mentioned that idea to the executive editor, and asked who I should tell on the advertising side, he bit my head off about not interfering with sales. Given how few ads we've had in the past few years, it's sad to hope we don't get any pegged to teams we're no longer including in the preview.

Assignments just went out, for the second year in a row stressing the need to write team features instead of straight previews. We've got capsules that will list the key returnees, newcomers, etc. But I suspect I'll be editing rehashed paragraphs full of "Johnny QB had 17 touchdowns last year, throwing to Receiver A, B and C" instead of explaining what Johnny QB (or, preferably, Johnny QB's line) has done to improve.

Lucky for me, the copy deadline is really early so I might not have the last-minute editing crush while trying to compile all the other sports' previews.

 

A month? Hell, a few of the high schools here kick off tomorrow, and most of the rest start Friday. My former paper's tab went out this past Sunday. Way too early, IMO, but that's the way we roll in the South.

 

We still run two 20-page tabs...one for football and one for volleyball.