Football preview: who to put on the cover

One boob, or one mom?

 

Well, I've been told we need more than one subject ...

 

Fine... two boobs it is. (sigh)

 

Why would you care about the wingnuts?

 

Who is telling you this? The ad dept. or the publisher. If it's the ad people, disregard and do what you like.

 

The son of the most annoying mom in the area. It might save you a lot of time.

 

Picking out the "most annoying" is not an easy task. Maybe if you set up some kind of bracket and voted them down, but then all of the annoying parents who didn't have their kid on the front will be on a double-dose rampage.

Make the cover solid white with black text.

 

Because it's not worth the trouble, Billy, when you have about 1,373,424 other ideas you can use that won't offend a cross-section of your readersihp.

 

I understand you could look at it that way, but it bothers me to let other people edit my paper for me.

(Now, I am not arguing that "Gunslingers" is a great way to approach it, but if it works, I am not going to change it because there are people out there won't like it)

Then again, I am in upstate New York. I was covering a Civil War re-enactor, and he asked the eighth-graders who had fired a 12-gauge with a deer slug and more than half the class -- girls included -- raised their hands.

 

I've never been too much of a fan of putting just a single player or coach on the cover. We've done multiple players, we've done an empty shot at night of the stadium (with lights on; it turned out pretty well); we did one cover with a shot of the top two quarterbacks in the city, both coming off ACL surgery.

We try to be different every year. Still thinking of what to do for this year's.

 

It wasn't my paper, but another down the road.
I saw no problem with its use because, as a functionally intelligent adult, I understood the connection between quarterbacks and gunslingers.

 

See, that's not the way to look at it ... making your line in the sand "functionally intelligent adults."

Do you read the comments on stories on your website? Tell me they're from "functionally intelligent adults." (Well, actually they are; you're just using the term too loosely.)

What you don't want to account for is the lunatic fringe at either end. You want to appeal to the sensible folk, the moderates, which is understandable. Just understand that the lunatic fringe IS IN YOUR READERSHIP, TOO. The people who fly off the handle if a 10th-grader sings a song with the word "damn" in it at a school recital. The people who believe no sporting event should begin without a Bible reading. THESE are your readers, too.

And you lose that entire end of your circulation demo, and you'll be looking for other work.