Section size

I'll echo Clever's sentiment. Not enough pages when we need them, then we'll get a whole open section the night after the MLB all-star game.

 

I can echo some of the same sad stories already told. I remember the night of the NCAA basketball final a few years ago (I think it was the Duke vs. Arizona year) when I was given three -- yes three!!! -- pages because news took a bunch of our pages. Nothing I could do but put out as tight a section as possible.

 

Weekdays: 3 to 5 pages
Saturdays: 4 to 6
Sundays: 8 almost always

I generally regard section space as an issue like the weather. It's a condition I have to deal with regardless.

As with most of you, sections are tighter than they were a year ago – and far tighter than five years ago. And I almost always get the most space when I don't seem to need it.

I can go to the mat for more space, but I try to reserve that for really crucial situations.

 

I can recall horror stories such as a Friday night around 1988 when we had 27 high-school football games AND the Olympics running live ... with a four-page section. That was a bit of a shitstorm.

 

What did you do run 3-inch recaps of the football games?

 

16K daily.

Monday-Saturday: 3-5 pages. Usually four, occassionally 3 or 5.
Sunday: 8 pages. Hardly any ads. Up from six pages when I got here.

Starting in the fall once we're fully staffed and doing the things I want us to be doing locally (I've been on the job seven weeks), we'll bump up to 4-6 pages Monday-Saturday (typically it'll be five). Our two pages of stocks are going online, so those two pages become all mine.

Regardless, MLB blows out one page, our cover takes another page and our jumps/scoreboard/tv page knocks out another. On 3-page sections, we're tight. On our four-page sections, we're just right. With our five-page sections, we can be scrambling. If it wasn't for the AP advance features, we'd never get our Sunday paper out. But once we're fully staffed, things will change and we won't be so reliant on AP copy to fill our pages.

 

Most papers I've been on, you don't measure by pages but by columns. You could have 60 columns over 12 pages (few ads) or 60 over 24 pages (lots of ads).

Biggest news hole I've dealt with was in the early 1990s when we averaged a bit more than 70 columns daily and 120 Sunday. That was a bear.

In the early 1980s I worked on a mid-major and sometimes Monday for Tuesday I would lay out a 21-column section. That was also a bear because it is a challenge to get everything in without looking like the classifieds. There was a heavy emphasis on editing.

Space is down just about everywhere, no doubt. I understand the economics, I just think that you reach a point that readers say, "Why bother?" At some point we're going to have to reassess our profit-margin expectations and give the readers more.

 

"Pages" is a horrible way to measure the size of section.
Finding a section's "newshole" or "editorial columns" is the only accurate way.
In the last four years, I've seen our section decrease by 10 editorial pages (60 columns) a week.
Our weekly newshole, which can be adjusted for events or time of year, averages about 57-58 columns a day or about 400 columns a week.
Obviously, we're lighter on Tuesday papers and heavier on Sunday papers.

If you find yourself light one day, heavy on another day, it is time to adjust.
Find a weekly budget. Someone has one. Adjust size of section accordingly. It takes time. But, in a day where I count inches on pages, it is the only logical solution.

 

I should add that on that mid-major with the 21-column Tuesday sections, it wasn't a matter of cheapness, really. It was an excellent newspaper, arguably the best of its size in the nation at the time. But as Fishwrapper notes, you need to manage the newshole. They would suck back on space each day so they could have a good reserve each year to blow it out when news or projects demanded it. A couple times a year there would be a 40-page tab with no ads to display a major investigation. The philosophy was, would you rather run stories 20 percent longer each day or tighten the hell out of them so you could have maximum impact on the days you needed it most. A very tough place to work, but an extremely well-managed newsroom -- although I was too young at the time to always understand this.

 

One of the major papers I worked on had a tight newshole for its size, and as Frank says, that's when good editing has to come to the fore. We haggled over and massaged every inch of it, and while it was sometimes painful, I enjoyed that approach more than I did working at places where the space was more expansive. Shoveling it in rarely makes for a tight, crisp-reading section.

 

I also think that sometimes, when you're met with ridiculous space limitations, you have to come to the ultimate conclusion that anything can be pitched completely if they squeeze you enough.

 

Indeed. Somewhere between the two ridiculous extremes is the place to be.