Breaking up the gray

Any tips or hints on breaking up the copy inside? Have no AP wire for photos, so that hurts. During the school seasons not such a big thing because multiple events are going on and you can get a lot of photos inside. But in the summer, obviously, not much to actually shoot -- hard enough to come up with at least one thing to shoot in order to have a centerpiece daily.

Have been able to put together some basic info boxes and that sort of thing, use some pull quotes when the story is able to warrant it, and have been able to get a few mugs scattered in there. Can't help but think, though, that there's something I could do that I'm not ... any help at all would be much appreciated.

 

Stand-alones are great. Kids at the pool, youth baseball or softball, adult league softball, summer high school basketball or legion baseball.

Even if you only got to, say, one legion game; get a handful of shots and use them as file art with roundups or features over the next week or so.

 

Mug shots, pull quotes, subheads.

Try to take info out of stories and make breakouts if you have time (which, during the summer, you probably do).

 

team/school logos can help as well

 

I'm really against floating logos. Just having a Bobcats logo in a story about Bumfuck High looks kind of stupid.

 

Yeah, I'm not big on logos just stuck in there -- score bugs, cool. Do that where I can. (Course not many summerish logos anyway, ya know? That's the problem right now, as I wind up having to fill with some wire stories. Not every day, but some days, they just drop too much space on me for what we've got to fill, so you get a pair of 25 of 30-inch AP stories dropped on an open page. use pull quotes, subheads and mugs (if I can get em) but just seems that that isn't enough some days and the page is still bland and gray. Guess that's just part of summer, eh? Can't wait till the school year starts again.

 

Just find little breakout elements from the AP copy. At the very least, you can put a breakout box that summarizes the story or the backstory.