As our football section gets ready..

Tabs are like everything else...why would I pay to read rosters, stats, stories in the paper when I can read it all for free somewhere online.

That said, the yearly football tabs are the things I miss the least. And the most, if that makes sense.

 

In the case of our high school tab ... because it ain't online. Not at first, anyway.

 

We beefed our high school preview up as well. Significantly. Pleasantly surprising.

 

Yeah, and a smaller daily down the road gets a 20 to 24-page tab. It is unreal.

 

The bad news? We didn't sell as many ads as we did last year.

The good news? We had such a huge jump in ads last year that I didn't expect us to match that total in this economy.

We're still at 24 pages broadsheet, but we've got a few open pages that we didn't have the last two years. Now, I got to figure out how to utilize them best.

 

That sounds familiar. It always seemed to involve at least one person pulling an all-nighter.

I don't miss the football tabs at all. Hell, when my last paper dropped the prep basketball tab that quickly turned into a blessing in disguise. If anything, I thought we wrote better preview features for the regular paper than we did for the old tab.

 

Looks like our high school tab will stay at 40 (same as last year). Ad reps have to sell a little more as there are some holes to fill. They tell us they'll make it happen or put in a few house ads. I told them I could use 1-2 of those open pages if they can't fill it. We have nine high schools and usually have a team in the championship game in the largest classification in our state.

 

High School football tabs should be the easiest sell in the world. A lot of businesses will buy ads just to "support the kid."

Big Earl's Shoe Shine, Oil Change and Taxidermy says "Go Tigers" .... that sort of thing.

 

Either we work at the same paper and I don't know your screen name or there are two papers. The SE announced that the good news is that we are up by four pages from last year and the bad news is that that ad ratio is way up and the newshole down. In this day and age, I said "Where's the bad news?"

 

Almost all of our tab copy -- like 74 out of 82 previews and half to two-thirds of the features -- were finished a week ago. We got the stragglers -- almost all of whom have new coaches who don't know the drill -- and the remaining features this past week. I haven't written a word for the tab since Wednesday.

 

BrianGriffin, guess we'll figure who each other is eventually. Go Irish!

 

Our section comes out Aug. 21, and our ad people -- as of Thursday -- had sold a whopping three ads.

Three! I know the economy is bad, but come the fuck on.