The line looks blurry

I'm surprised anyone is green enough to think this doesn't happen all the time. Sometimes you have to take one for the team. What you don't have to do is take it up the ass. If someone calls in and complains, just say "I agree with you, but it wasn't my decision. I was doing what I was told. Let me direct your call to (somewhere up the line)."

I do agree with not putting you name on it. Use From Staff Reports or whatever.

We laugh at our news department all the time. When gas prices spike and they want a photo, guess what, it's of a station that doesn't advertise. When they do a story that gas prices have really dropped, you can bet it's a photo of an advertiser's sign. For the annual Black Friday obligatory photo of people lined up outside a story, you can guarantee it's going to be of a store that advertises.

 

I would try to get more information on what the deal is and how the ads are being sold and then go to the other three schools to see if they want to do the same thing.

If you're gonna work in advertising, might as well go all the way. Make sure you get a commission.

 

If you regularly cover say 3 schools and only one is getting this treatment then its dirty. Puts you in a lousy spot with your relationships with the other two schools. Yuck.

 

What Team A's coach did was suggest a tab idea -- apparently not a bad one for your area.

What your publisher should have done is expanded on that and made it a hockey tab, not a Team A tab.

Team A's coach just found a way to put his team out in front of others in terms of coverage and publicity.

 

The coach of Team A seems to be the smartest guy in the room.

 

Does Team A get a disproportional amount of the readership? In my market, there's a BCS team in the heart of our circulation and three smaller Division I programs -- one small FBS and two FCS schools -- in our circulation.

I see the metrics every day and the BCS school gets about 4x the readership of the other three schools combined. On Saturdays, if all four were at home on the same day, the attendance at the BCS school's game would more than double the other three teams combined.

Given that, I would have no problem whatsoever with a wraparound that was completely about the BCS school. It gets the readers and gets the ads. The coverage of the other three can go in the regular section.

Having said that, our gameday section includes all the schools in our circulation ... I'm just saying I'd have no problem if the other schools were kicked out of the gameday section and into the regular section. Our tab also includes everybody, but by everybody I mean pro, college and preps.

 

I think Bristol's got this boiled down pretty accurately.

 

DO NOT tell a reader you agree with his complaint. Just forward it up the line to someone in charge. When your bosses get tired of fielding the complaints, they'll change the policy. Or not. But you don't set policy, so you don't what to get in the middle of that argument.

 

Sounds like the Staples-LA Times shit from a few years ago.

Smart idea by the coach. Bad idea by the publisher to go along and foist it on the staff.

Please update us with the resulting shitstorm.

 

This used to happen at my old place on the East Coast where an FCS football team is king. The school would sponsor a four page wrap and we'd use our normal advance, notebook and photos for the section, in addition to another story or two on the team, perhaps a column as well. It didn't ever seem to me that the stories we used for the wrap were overly "positive" of the team.

We'd also do a coaches show on our website, which the school paid for and our beat writer was the host. I always thought it was slimy, but my former editor told me the "horse had left the barn already," so I might as well deal with it. So, it's not uncommon, if that's what the original poster is asking.

 

I have a question. You say it's a four-page wrap. Is this a stand-alone section or part of your daily (or weekly) sports section? To me, that's the difference.

If your newspaper is sponsoring a special four-page "Ra, Ra! Go Team !" wrap that is independent of your regular coverage and not included in your section in any way--say, the way a special home improvement tab or progress section would be--then I think it's fine. It's shady but it's fine. In this case, it's a supplemental section put out by your ads department to generate revenue and meant, entirely, as a commercial venture, one where your integrity and objectively is not on the line.

If, however, this is part of your regular section --and doesn't have the words 'special advertisement' at the top--then it's completely and 100 percent unethical and awful and just the type of thing that removes any shred of credibility your place of business has.

So, which is it?

 

The horse always seems to leave the barn, that is, until the journalist starts cashing in as well. Then it magically becomes unethical again.