Inland Empire implosion

This, I completely agree with you on Frederick.

 

If somebody was good at selling, why would they work in a newspaper ad department?

 

I would put all my other duties aside to, for 14 nights in the fall, coordinate prep football coverage with nine zones, dozens of schools, hundreds of pages and more than a dozen editors/designers making it happen. Now the big games are two travel-ball schools playing on TV.

 

Thanks Doc. I am convinced you know your shit.

 

True, but I do think you can make some serious $$$ if you started a newspaper covering preps only in a medium sized to big city. The banks; the car dealerships, the stores; they wanna support the local high schools.

 

I don't know. I did something like that in a weekly form 20 years ago. The local weekly did jack for sports (this was in a city that had high school hockey and basketball powers) and the metro dailies didn't cover preps a ton. It was more of a vanity project for me because I had absolutely no clue how to sell ads (and didn't have time to do so), and it was a pain to get it in the local stores. And yeah, my pagination skills sucked. It lasted for a few issues.

 

Good question. But I think it definitely is one of the reasons newspapers died. For the most part "good people" were writing for newspapers. Good people were editing newspapers. I mean excellent people. The problem has been the ad departments coupled with general managers who tried to save their own ass by cutting pages and content in an attempt to save money on newsprint.

 

You should search for Frank Ridgeway's (RIP) posts about newspaper ad sales. He had some great insight. It's a tough job that has only gotten tougher, and anybody who has a real knack for it is going to go sell cars or something where they can make real money.

I can think of a couple high school sports publications similar to what you've described, one in New Jersey and one in Virginia. They have managed to stay in business, but I don't think anyone has gotten rich. I know one has started using Patreon. You might find it interesting that the one in Virginia has its game update tweets sponsored by a local body shop. But for the most part the local stores and car dealers aren't advertising. The bulk of the ads are bought by private schools they cover.

 

Thanks jake, nice response. Thank u.

 

That is absolutely astounding, but damn impressive.

 

I don't live in SoCal, but I've heard that also from a friend who used to design those sections.

 

At one point the Varsity special section each week in the OCR was like 100 pages, right?