So how's your tab coming?

Fall is nearing, school is starting, so here's my question:
How's your tab coming?
Feel free to vent at the incompetence that athletic directors are or the lack of your ad department being able to sell a tab.
Swing for the fences, bitch away.

 

Nonexistent.

Just had to be the first.

 

The lack of ads never ceases to baffle me. We've got 12 pages, maybe five or six ads and none more than a quarter page (only one of those). Shouldn't this be the one section we sell better than any other? Anyway, copy deadline is this week, still finishing up the cover story and a couple of sidebar things and waiting for team previews from a few people.

 

we start laying out the 48-page prep tab tomorrow. has to be done by thursday at midnight. then, we dive straight into the 16-page college preview. it has to be finished by Monday. still missing some rosters and three stringer-authored stories. Oh yeah, and i still have to write the centerpiece. other than that, it's going swimmingly. Nothing else is going on this time of year except that prep volleyball starts saturday, cross country next week, football jamborees this thursday and friday, and of course the local D-2 college starts volleyball and soccer next week and is looking for previews.

 

No tab this year. Not missing it at all ...

 

We've had some problems with incompetent ADs, but I think we're off to a good start.

 

Wrote the last story Friday, prints tomorrow, hits the streets this coming Friday -- a day after the first prep game of the season.

 

I've been told we will have a tab, but that they've yet to start selling for it. Nice.

As far as the actual content, that's not a problem. We've done a feature for each team every day since preseason camp started so we're pretty in tune with how things are going to be.

Though with the way things are going, I'm getting more worried with each day whether we will have a tab. Our ad people can't sell at all.

 

Beats me. I don't really give a shit anymore either.

 

First August since 1984 or '85 for me to have no involvement in a football tab. I do not miss it. I've had a lifetime supply.

 

I've gotten ahold of one coach, still have another, goes to press Thursday, prints Friday. The ad people at my shop are idiotic and never bother to ask us where we want ads or what we want out of a tab, so we'll be fudging with where they put them so we can have a real centerspread.

 

48 broadsheet here... four 12-page sections.

Just checked the ad log: 544 inches of ads listed -- 48 broadsheets is 6048 inches of space. Uh oh.

I'm supposed to receive the dummies today. For some reason, I'm guessing at 9 percent advertising, I won't be receiving those 48 pages that were promised... not that I blame them, if that's what happens, but the work has already been done in terms of writing, photographs, graphics to fill the 48.