Grip and grins, and other crap

Do your readers care about grip and grins, or business stories that are "strongly" recommended by the ad manager?

It seems we just coddle advertisers too much and get too little in return. I would assume that if newspapers concentrated on putting out a product worth reading, people would read it, and businesses would want to capture that audience.

A little too simplistic for the ad staff at a newspaper.

 

What do you mean by grip and grins?
And if your ad manager is "strongly" recommending stories, someone should "strongly" recommend he stay the fuck out of the newsroom.

 

Don't do grip and grins. Just don't.

awriter, by "grip and grins," I presume he means posed photos of college signings, ribbon cuttings, etc.

 

Aand while I hate grip and grins as much as the next bitter old veteran fuck, do these economic times --especially in newspapers -- not mean you have to bend a little? The job you save might be your own...

 

Check-passing photo.

Word.

 

We had a photographer, who hated them as much as we did, call them "three against the wall" photos.

 

There was a time when I said that I would only do a check passing photo if the recipient was willing to first eat the check.

Those times are gone.

In my early jobs, if the ad manager walked into the newsroom, the managing editor's first question would be, "What the hell are you doing here."

Now, we "expand our market with niche publications", "cross-purpose consumer information", "build our brand identification with mutually beneficial market sponsorships", etc.

Yes, many of us have been sold out. We're losing credibility and receiving little in return.

 

My question is this. Will readers complain if the grip and grins go away, or will advertisers just bitch? I presume it's the latter.

 

People who hand out checks hoping to get their photos in the paper, not only work just as hard as people who get their photos in for no good reason, they actually work harder!

So there's that.

 

They should just use those checks to buy ads.

 

One of the papers where I work (yes, there are two; that's for another time) is a small twice-a-week free paper in a small town. The purists among you may loathe the grip-and-grins, but they are a staple of our coverage. The pics are usually of groups or businesses in town donating large amounts of money to non-profits or people in need. And, yes, if we didn't run them, we'd hear about it from both readers and advertisers.

 

My journalism teacher called them "firing squad" photos.