Running Football Tab Thread

Did he pass it along to Washington a couple of weeks later?

 

Excuse me.

I'm massively bummed out.

I wrote a tab piece on a kid who was closing in on his brother's school rushing record. Brother died today in a car accident (He was drinking).

I was informed the story will stay in the tab, basically as is.

I'm not sure how I feel about this.

 

Whew. We just got done with our second tab -- high schools, 56-pager (not including cover/inside cover/inside back/back cover with three ads) highlighting 45 schools -- yesterday. Sucker prints tomorrow. In papers Friday. The first tab -- 48 pages (plus cover, etc.), HEAVY on Podunk U with pages for the other two Division II programs in our area and on each school in Podunk U's conference -- printed last week for publication Sunday.

Pretty much all the things in this thread, thankfully, are staples of ours. Each high school gets its own story and "breakdown" with general info, returners, key games, and schedule. The story that goes with it previews each team. And the cover subject is always a standalone story (this year, talking about two city schools making the leap up in class to the state's largest division). Good stuff, though largely utilitarian (I like to take the "you did more on this team!" bat out of angry mommys hands as much as possible). We run team-by-team skeds and a weekly sked on the final three pages. Ad folks sell "team pages", where if they get enough little ads, they build entire pages and track the team photos down themselves. If they sell less, the team gets a half-page ad (or, of course, none at all). Of all the things great and small I have accomplished here, keeping the ad folks doing all that legwork and not having it backlash onto me is in my top 5 most significant.

College tab gets flashier. Again, main story with the cover (this year, Podunk U's star running back can break the U's career rushing record), with position-by-position breakdown stories on Podunk U. Run a conference schedule grid in full color, Podunk U's roster (over two pages) and probable depth charts (over two more). More color in that one than the high school one (which I run in full b/w, again by choice).

rb

 

Man, that's tough. And guess who will look bad for it running. Nobody else except for who has the byline. Can you talk the editor into inserting a note at the beginning?

 

The editor said he would edit the story to include the death of the brother. Not sure how that will work out though.

 

The more I think about it, if it's presented right, running the story may not be that bad. In fact it may help his family and friends in some way.

 

No, it'll print Tuesday night, I think, and will run in Friday's paper.

 

How does one paper cover 30-40 high schools? They don't. They spray the board with scores and whatever info they can put in and put the focus where the action is. It's not coverage though. Anyone who lives in a metro area isn't relying on the big paper for their HS coverage. I certainly never did when I lived in the Bay Area.

 

My deadline is the 29th and I still got four teams to do, ugh. I have no motivation at all this year to do this unlike last year. Sigh, the pages are done, just need to insert the copy and do the photos. Cover is almost done. Yeah, yeah my fault for slacking but whatever. Working two jobs has sort of burned me out. Anyway, it should still be pretty good: Top 10, ratings, previews, key players, matchups, losses..blah blah blah typical football tab garbage.

 

Finished ours Wednesday night, and it printed Thursday at 1 p.m. Gave it a look as it came off the press, then left for the LL World Series.

It was pretty clean, with the exception of one factual error (wrong HS on a former player) in 10-point on the high school cover. Found that out this afternoon. I was a little bummed about that, but when you're doing 36 pages in four days with one other person proofing in addition to you, it's close to impossible to catch everything. I think I'm pretty happy with the product in retrospect. We did what worked before, made some subtle improvements in other areas.

 

response to our 64-pager was good. few, if any, calls of complaint -- which I take as a good thing.

by the way, we included rosters on all 40-plus schools for the first time. It took until the morning of the day the damned thing published to round the last of them up, but we got 'em all.

 

One year we had to wait five days between the printing and when the section was inserted into the paper

Our cover story was my piece on a college running back who was on his way to becoming the school's all-time leading rusher.

The night the section was printed, I find out the guy hurt his knee in practice and could be out for the season.

Fortunately, it was only a bad sprain and he missed one game. But we were sweating it for a couple of days.