Football tab thread 2012

Did I miss this? Have people quit doing them or are there just not any interesting stories this year?

We navigated our 48-page tab fairly well this time around. Plenty of advance planning, just a few miscues down the stretch in pulling it all together and the pages were all sent back a full day (!) ahead of the press start.

Best of all, I didn't paginate the damned thing. I took our lead desk guy, sicced him on that and I worked his night shift for a week. My problem is that I'll start out strongly, do 8 great pages and then get bored and struggle the rest of the way.

I gave my guy a week to get it done and a strong incentive - he could have off from the time he finished until the start of his shift on Tuesday this week. He wrapped up on Thursday and got a heckuva good long weekend before football starts this weekend.

Best of all, ad sales exceeded our projection by several thousand bucks.

 

I wrapped up the last of my preview stories more than a week ago and apparently was the only guy on staff to get all copy in by the preliminary deadline. My reward for doing so? "Hey, remember that feature we said we weren't going to need? We're going to need it."

Fortunately, I had already done the interviews and conducted the necessary research (and still had everything in the system), so it only took a couple of hours to slap the story together.

Since we went to a central desk (only about 400 miles away) a few years ago, we don't have to deal with layout. Of course, this has led to such problems as a 2A school being placed in the 3A section (screwed up the page count for both) and one of our little-bitty six-man teams being left out entirely (fortunately, another little-bitty six-man school wound up cancelling its season because of low numbers, so things worked out on that one).

The big production issue came to light last week when someone figured out the pages were a half inch narrower than we were originally told. This forced the cutting of every story that had to hold to one page. The guy who has the area beat was still bitching about it Saturday even after the SE told him multiple times that the decision was made higher up the chain and we'll just have to live with it.

 

We're way behind from where we were last year at this point, but it's only Monday so it's still early for me to bitch too much. Come see me Thursday though, I'm sure I'll be ready to punch something/someone.

 

We haven't had a tab in four years now. Advertising claims they can't sell it. We run our high school previews in a countdown in the daily, 15 to 1. College previews follow that. The only problem is with this is that our centerpiece is defined for 15 straight days. No real leeway if something else big breaks or if someone has a fantastic feature worthy of centerpiece treatment. Get in line behind the prep previews.

 

I'd have to fire me some salespeople. What part of the country are you in?

 

How soon does football start for y'all

 

We have five college teams, NAIA to D1, and a few years back quit doing a college tab because advertising couldn't sell it. So they said.

 

We have an almost-full slate of games this Friday, Aug. 17. Too damned early, by at least a week, but that's the way it is.

 

I don't miss high school football season in the South. Those people are lunatics.

Friday nights on the desk were a rush, for sure. There was definitely a sense of accomplishment when the madness was over. But then, I was like....what exactly did I just accomplish? Other than waste precious bar time taking call-ins from Joe Schmo, who may or may not have given me accurate scores and stats?

 

You did your job.

 

Our tab was cancelled at the last minute. We've had an on-again, off-again situation with tabs.

There are regions of the country where I can see them not selling. I'm in one of them.

 

The best part of Football Fridays were when the prep guy and myself made our weekly run to Chick-Fil-A for dinner before the madness began.