Football tabs

Our biggest problem was getting the ad department to sell ads for the tabs/previews.

At bigger papers, unless you give them some incentive or commission or something, they just don't even try.

So we stopped doing separate high school football previews and just ran it in the Sports ection over multiple days. Why break out a special section with no ads to show for it?

 

Or Harry Potter?

 

I feel like driving to Lexington and punching someone in the face and I know why.

 

Please show me this.

 

In my time in the newsroom, we've run football (preseason), volleyball (preseason), boys/girls basketball (between regular season and playoffs) and limited-circulation spring sports (preseason) tabs.

Only reason doing away with the ones this fall are because the season is starting two weeks earlier than normal. That being said, I don't think we'll be going back to them. At least I hope not.

 

31 prep football teams, two top 10 FBS teams and a Top 25 D-II team. Yeah, the section is a little crowded when football starts.

 

Will be getting pages for 32-page tab tomorrow afternoon. 24 hours before, there were four ads in it.

Well worth the sports staff time.

 

Sounds like a place I used to work.

 

Our paper quit producing them because it lost money. Even though I understood there was over a 50 percent increase in rack sales the day the tab was published, I guess there wasn't enough ad revenue to keep it going.

The paper also does a special county fair section. The last year we did our football preview, they had the same sales guy sell both the fair section and the tab. The fair is in early August, so the fair section and the tab were only separated by only a couple weeks. I don't know why the higher ups were surprised when the sales guy that got a bunch of businesses to shell out for the fair section, only to have them refuse to shell out extra money for the tab two weeks later.

I made a suggestion a year or two before we quit. If there wasn't enough ad revenue, why not increase the rack sale price the day of the preview? Sunday papers cost more. Since the football preview has 24 extra pages in it, why not increase the sales rack price to the same as the Sunday edition that day? Surely it couldn't be that much of a hassle to change the rack prices for one day, right?

 

@Apeman: You're not alone when you say meeting the monthly ad revenue quota trumps everything else — like, oh, common sense. Sigh.

Our shop does fall, winter and spring sports tabs. In the past, the ad department had a retired guy with plenty of connections in the community sell ads for it (an ad department stringer!) and it worked great. Always plenty of pages. He passed away a couple years ago, and our shop's ad reps don't have the same passion for selling ads in these tabs. Unfortunately, we still have the same amount of stuff to cram in, with fewer pages.

 

My idea has always been (feel free steal it) is to contact the high school boster clubs to sell ads for your paper's website. They would go on a page dedicated to that school.

Come up with what types of ads they can sell and what they would go for and split the money with the booster club.

Maybe tout them in print somehow in the preview sections.

I think this could work because:

1. Booster clubs are always looking to raise money
2. Ad departments generally stink at selling web ads and don't bother selling one to Pedro's Sub Shop across from Podunk High
3. It makes the parents partners with the paper. Start with ads and you can probably get them submitting rosters and photos and such from each of the sports.
4. It beats a pankcake breakfast, car wash and selling mulch.


Enjoy!

 

This is my second go at a football tab at my current gig. Last year we tried to make it "different" but failed. I had an idea on a theme to run through the tab, but we simply couldn't execute it. It ended up being a story on each team, no real central theme, kind of disjointed, nothing to really get excited about.

Which set the stage for this year (I started preplanning the tab in February). We're putting out the biggest tab they've ever done at the paper and (drumroll) ... it only has one bylined story in it.

Our theme is technology based, so that's what our feature/centerpiece story is. Every other page is built to look like you're online. So a team page looks like Facebook. It's "friends" are former players and coaches. The "places" it has recently visited are landmarks near the school (some local restaurant or park). A five random questions with a player is built in as one of the stories, as well as a "post" where a link to to the online preview story (a little 400-word blurb) lives online.

The new coaches are part of a two-page spread called CoachingMatch.com. The players to watch are built into a Buzzfeed style page. The team capsules have a Wikipedia theme. We have a quiz page that looks like one of those cheesy online quizzes you take when you get bored. There are a ton of story links in the tab designed to drive traffic back to our online content (something our new corporate overlords would like to see).

In short, this tab was one of the biggest undertakings I've ever been a part of and I'm really, really, really happy with the turnout. (Hits the rack tomorrow)