Team photos in your tabs

Just curious -- for those of you who do prep tabs, do you run team photos of all of your teams?

That was kind of the norm for our tabs before I got here. Six football teams = six stories and a team photo, and maybe an action shot worked in, plus schedules. Twelve basketball teams (boys and girls from my six schools) = 12 stories, 12 team photos and usually room for nothing else.

Well, in an editorial meeting on our BKB tab weeks ago, sensing that space is likely going to be tight, we talked about not worrying about team photos and full preview stories on every team. Instead, we decide to make it more feature-based, with capsules on every team -- a lot like what a magazine might have or what I saw in USA Today's BKB preview. I got excited about not having to arrange 12 team photos and instead doing something more innovative and entertaining for the reader (and more fun for us)...

Anyways, the ad staff calls me into a meeting this morning to talk about things and they about have a fit when I say I'm not running 12 team photos in the tab. What?!?! How could you?!?! It's what we've always done?!?!? The parents will be so upset?!?!

I try to explain that this isn't just for mom and dad but for our whole reading audience. But to no avail. The higher-ups deem that team photos need to be in the tab. Argg. I guess it's nice to have a record of every team for every year but it makes for a boring section when those hog up all the space... Anyone else have similar issues?

 

"the higher-ups deem ..."

What higher-ups?

Your editors and publisher? Or the "ad staff" that went nuts?

"That's the way it's always been done" is one of the worst excuses ever. Fuck that and fuck your ad staff for dictating or trying to dictate what you do in editorial.

If your ad staff is running the show, it's time to get out.

 

No.

 

We don't do team photos. We once had a coach say if we couldn't run a team photo then he didn't want a photo at all. Well, alrighty then! No photo for you. One less thing we have to worry about.

 

To me, about six players in some kind of interesting group shot is the max.

Team photos are for yearbooks.

 

NEVER run team photos. It looks like crap and reflects poorly on your section. If mom and dad want a team picture, they should go out and buy one.

 

Team photos are pointless in a newspaper. They're boring and add absolutely nothing.
Also, they have no dominant element, making the photo even more useless.

 

I don't like them, but I can see that if you have 60 players on six teams, that's 360 kids with a combined family/friend output of more than 1,000. That's a little more compelling than the cross country mom or volleyball dad whining about their product of a box of wine and a Dollar Tree condom behind the bowling alley child not getting enough "respect" from the paper.

But if you can't run them all, don't run any of them. It got to be too much of a pain in the ass to get all the photos, and my special section died because of lack of interest from ad reps, so I didn't bother. Nobody noticed. Nobody ever noticed.

 

Your cross country special section?

 

We try to go with action shots of returning players.

 

run them postage-stamp size.

that'll show them.

 

That was my plan initially ... I don't mind putting them in the back of the tab if there is space - what's the harm? But it's when space is tight and I've got to worry about squeezing in 12 team photos, that frustrates me ... Not to mention going out and arranging them ...

I guess I could have put up more of a fight but I didn't -- and now I'm regretting it the more I think about it...