Football tab thread 2012

[young-gun11]

If I had my druthers, though, I wouldn't do a football tab. Instead I'd do one team per day in the regular paper leading up to the start of the season. Give people a reason to buy the regular paper, instead of waiting for the tab to come out one particular day. Our tab has only broken even the last several years, anyway, and it should be a huge moneymaker.

We did this anyway at my last shop, even with a tab. We covered seven high schools - once practices started, each team would be previewed weekly leading up to the preview tab. Of course, the story angles were different and varied and never repeated. We always found enough storylines to warrant a team to have about 3 weekly stories and its tab preview.

I did this as well. Started previewing teams (one per week) in July. Gave me something to fill up my section during a very slow period and it wasn't hard to find two or three stories at each school.

 

[spikechiquet]

ASE had to take a whole week to layout an 80-page tab (all high school) that we were given about 3 weeks notice to do.
We had to do it pretty straight:
* 8 league previews
* a page each for 63 schools which included a team pic, and capsule

We wrapped up last Monday, was in paper's Weds. It's quick and dirty, but done.

 

[dixiehack]

Outing alert: Bradley's customer is a Dapper Dan man.

 

[apeman33]

12 pages this year, like always. But the pages are longer (same width, though) because they decided to switch from the tabloid pages to the ones used for the shopper. Once I get in everything I usually do get in, I'm going to need a bunch of filler. And of course, one of the schools didn't return its survey.

Right now, the head coach of the main school's team is 20 minutes late for his interview. Not that he's ever been known for being on time. If he finds an extra thing or two to go over at the end of practice, they go ahead and cover it, so I figure "See you at 6:30" meant something more like "See you at 5 after 7" anyway.

 

[MeanGreenATO]

We're full in heck mode on our tab, which has already made more money than last year's tab and is slated for another 84ish pages for 11 schools, a six-man school and a DI university.

6-7 pages per school? That's a helluva lot of information

Or, I might hope, a heck of a lot of ads.

That thing is stacked with ads. For most of our area schools, we'll do about 30 inches in copy, while the city schools get about 55 inches. Since we've switched to the magazine style, we've banked every year and pulled in APSEs. We just sent it to the printer today.

 

[HejiraHenry]

The only thing more exciting than piloting a MEDEVAC mission is a Friday night on the desk.

Man, I miss that, sometimes.

We've made decent back-to-back landings, as it were. The weather looks a little choppy this week, though.

 

[Toby Carrig]

Sorry to be late on making this offer this year, but since so many people still seem to be publishing football preview special sections of some substance, I would be happy to coordinate an exchange of papers once again.

The guidelines:
Send me about 12-18 copies of your sections and I will get 12-18 different sections sent back to you, provided that many people participate. (I will update here at SportsJournalists.com.) If you have fewer than 12, that's fine, I will still get some sent back out to you.
Send me an address label, preferably sticky, so that I have a proper address to throw on the box.
Send me a note via PM here, or email (tobyapse@yahoo.com) just to let me know if you're in.
Let's go with a September 22 deadline, and I will effort to get them back in the mail in early October.
My mailing address:
Toby Carrig
814 Wilshire Place
Herculaneum, MO 63048

 

[Mark2010]

We're full in heck mode on our tab, which has already made more money than last year's tab and is slated for another 84ish pages for 11 schools, a six-man school and a DI university.

6-7 pages per school? That's a helluva lot of information

Or, I might hope, a heck of a lot of ads.

That thing is stacked with ads. For most of our area schools, we'll do about 30 inches in copy, while the city schools get about 55 inches. Since we've switched to the magazine style, we've banked every year and pulled in APSEs. We just sent it to the printer today.

55 inches on a high school team?!?!?!

Good Lord!!

 

[MightyMouse]

Ours printed Wednesday. I'm thankful to be done with that headache.

Advert screwed us again. Deadline was last Thursday. We were supposed to have dummies on Friday. Ad shrew tells us they are extending their own deadline and that we'll get dummies Monday around noon.

Finally get the dummies, and there are notes on them, telling us which stories have to go on which pages, because they sold content-specfic ads -- a definite no-no.

Deskers worked their magic and got the thing put together by Monday night.

The next time advert is actually held to a hard deadline or is held accountable for missing that deadline or can actually do their job the right way, rather than making promises to advertisers that they shouldn't be making, will be the first time.

So ... yeah, that's how my week has gone.

 

[young-gun11]

Where? Where?

All I ever heard was "we can't sell it".

That's odd. Maybe it's the small-town thing, but the Fall Sports tab is our second biggest seller.

 

[fossywriter8]

Small-town weekly published on a Sunday, with deadline on Friday morning (I'll leave the discussion on how this makes sports look for another time).
I'm one of two writers and the only one handling sports, though the other guy helps out with tab pictures.
We have eight schools in our coverage area, including a public and private in town.
The 48-page tab covers all sports at all schools. Six have football and only the in-town public school has girls tennis (boys in the spring). All eight have volleyball and golf, and seven have cross country.
We do an overall feature, along with feature stories with team pics on the in-town public and private schools' teams. The other schools' teams get a team picture, unless it's after deadline, and an information capsule. All six football teams have their roster, coaching staff, last year's game-by-game scores and this year's schedule all printed in a box next to their preview.
We also publish team pics of the cheerleaders.
Our ad guy (yeah, we're small) did a great job of selling, despite the fact we've had a lot of factories in the region close down over the past few years and many of our schools are the small, country school type with little to no business base to draw from.
We actually do three sports tabs each year: Fall, winter and spring, with each including all sports for that season.