Jonesboro Sun Layoffs

When I worked there it was around 16,000. Jonesboro is about 65,000 now in population and The Sun is the only 7-day a week paper probably in Northeast Arkansas.

 

If The Sun won't cover ASU, no one will.

 

That's true Matt. I'm not sure the Democrat-Gazzette is even aware ASU exists.

 

Northeast Arkansas is not a high school football hotbed, at least not in Jonesboro's coverage area. That used to be basketball country until a few years ago, when a bunch of hoops-only schools that were big enough started fielding football teams. That area is one of those weird areas where football never caught on until recently.

 

Three full-timers should be sufficient at a paper that size. Four would be a luxury in this day and age, especially if someone else is doing the paginating.

I'd venture you have one ASU writer, one exclusively preps writer and one who swings between preps/ASU and general assignments.

 

Especially when the advertisers want it ...

Perfect example of this is from my former employers -- for years, they did a weekly football tab on the Friday before the game ... very popular with advertisers and readers (and they did a weekly "pick the winners" contest that would average 100-plus entries a week) ... it also kept the football out of the shrinking sports hole in the paper on what was usually one of the busiest prep sports nights (Thursday) of the week ...

New publisher comes along, and she doesn't like it ... does away with the football tab for an all-fall sports preview tab (and subsequent winter and spring sports tabs) because "it's fair to the other sports; why should football be treated different?" and her previous stop did something along those lines (although she didn't mention at the time that her previous job was running a chain of a half-dozen weeklies in the same geographic area, which made things easier as far as ad sales and production) ...

Well, the all-sports tabs were, to put it bluntly, an effing bust -- our ad staff sold about a quarter of the ads (and that's generous) they had in the football-only tab ... and lets not talk about the time and effort us poor sports guys (myself and one other person) had to go through to put out the tab AND the daily paper (and with no OT, guess who a lot of the work fell to? Yours truly, the guy who was the salaried person) ... And the daily product? Well, the football previews had to go in it every Friday, along with the pick the winner contest (which lost its sponsor when they did away with the tab, so the paper had to foot the bill) ...

After a year or so of that, she finally relented and resumed the weekly football tab (although we still had to make the first issue an all-fall sports tab, and kept doing the winter and spring tabs as well) ... however, the advertisers did not return (I guess they're waiting to see if she's going to flip flop again) ... and now that I'm no longer there, the remaining sports writer had to do all the spring preview stories himself (I forgot to mention that the paper's freelancer budget had been shrinking the last three years) ...

 

One place I worked at did a weekly 12-to-16 page tab devoted to the local NAIA football team. Every week, home or away, during the season. It was very nice and advertisers loved it.

Problem was it basically took one person away from everything else for the entire fall season. Game previews, features, Q&A, scouting report, etc. in the tab (which had to be done by Thursday night) and then game coverage on Sat for the Sunday edition. Nice stuff, but it basically reduced a 3 1/2 person staff to 2 1/2 to cover everything else and paginate the section 7 days per week.

Not a good use of resources for a paper that size, IMO. After a couple of years of doing that, our SE (who doubled as the college beat guy) hit the door.

I like the idea of doing a season preview tab, but not every freakin week. The workload just kills you.

 

When I was around we did a "Game Day" insert for every ASU home game. It wasn't much but I know the advertisers loved and it. We also did the football tab and also did one for basketball that was quite popular.

I'm sure The Sun will be fine and will manage to produce a decent section. It will just take some adjusting to make it happen. The city of Jonesboro has four high schools and I know The Sun tried to cover each as much as they could. I'm sure that will change now.

 

Yeah, you don't cover every single high school game at each school. You pick a 'game of the night', staff that one and the others are phoners in a roundup. Spread it out so that each school gets roughly equivalent amount of exposure, given their respective level of competitiveness.

I like the GameDay inserts for college or pro football. I just resented the percentage of manpower devoted to that one thing while the rest of us were left to carry a heavier load.

 

The Democrat-Gazette (based in Little Rock) barely acknowledges the presence of the University of Arkansas-Little Rock, which, you know, is in Little Rock.