How do I end a tradition?

We forward them to the news side to run in the Friday community section.

 

I usually try to slowly spread them out (we're giving them at least $150 in free space for crying out loud), but around holidays, I'll go heavy on the submitted pics for that very reason. It gets the page off my desk quicker, and it's good to give some extra time to production, just incase something goes wrong. The post office appreciates it too. But yeah, it feels like stealing.

 

We have a community page on Sundays that we put all that wonderful stuff on. The less actual work we have to do for that page, the happier we are.

We usually get enough to churn those things out 2-3 weeks in advance.

 

Start a new tradition.

 

We have a policy that team photos run, not for tournament championships, but for teams that have won a district or provincial championship only.
Good teams might win four or five tournaments a year and we've told readers we won't run the same photo of the same kids holding their finger up where the only thing that changes is the banner or trophy in front of them.
Saying that, we have a space on the stat/agate page for a "photo of the day" to break up our agate package. Most times it's an unusual wire shot, or a second shot from the same event by our photographers, a photo which might not otherwise make the paper. Sometimes, we drop the team shots or year end school athlete of the year photos in that spot. We hesitate to do it too much -- don't want that spot turning into the "team shot of the day" or whatever. But it seems to work. If you have a pile of them, you can string them down the middle of that stat page, burning off two or three at a time.
Agate readers will read the page anyway and read right around them. Mommies and Daddies who don't normally read the stats might start.

 

We have a "youth sports picture page" we run once a week. The advertisers seem to love it and it's a nice place to put submitted team photos.

I second Cadet's notion: make a policy that works for you and stick to it. One of my old publisher's decided to bring over her former paper's policies on everything and it turned into a complete disaster. Do what works for you and make everyone follow the rules.

 

Set a new policy with your editor that works for your paper.

That way you can point to the policy and then to the editor when the calls start coming.

Put 'em online on a giant never-will-die "Great Youth Sports" section or something like that. Web, web, web.

 

whatever you do, dont run photos of teams that didnt win something or finish in first place. Once you start running photos of teams that finished second in this tournament, third in this league, fourth in their division but really showed great effort and heart, the slope gets slippery fast

 

I run them when I have space. I don't promise a day.

 

Some of you really seem to get off on being assholes about this. I know some parents can be real pieces of shit when it comes to this stuff, but plenty others just want to see their kids in the paper and don't give a damn about the 18 year old American Legion kids you're tromping all across the city to cover. If you're at a small paper and you have a "I take as long as possible" or a "Well, life is full of disappointments, get used to it." attitude, you really should reconsider your career choice. Dealing with crap like that is what small papers are all about.

 

Speaking only for myself, my gripe is the parents who act like (and will sometimes even say) only their stories matter.
That's what pisses me off and not want to run these things.
It has nothing to do with the kids.

 

First come on a space-available basis. The tricky part is setting the precedent over what constitutes a worthy submission.

I worked in an area where there were two traveling youth softball teams. One was run by a super guy, one who wasn't bitter, nasty, resentful, that entered his team is high-caliber tournaments. They didn't win bunches of those, didn't bark about photos and - based on the couple of times I was around them for stories that only partially involved them - had a laid-back attitude and some perspective about them.

The other entered every fourth- and fifth-rate tournament, tried to submit photos every freaking week, barked that we weren't there to cover them every step of the way - using the gender card, which made me want to obliterate the male head honcho - and would consistently badger us about running those photos.

Bottom line: Do your research, draw the line and STICK TO IT.