Winding down...

Just finished our 40-page broadsheet high school football section (covering 12 schools).

By my count, spent 51 hours on it, all in the last 3 nights.

I need a drink... or five.

Thanks for listening to be whine like a little bitch.

 

Nice work. I hope you get your drinks.

 

Right in the middle of mine. I just came home to eat and change clothes.

God help us all.

 

Jeremy: I'm thinking Diet Coke will have to do.

INT: Hang in there... there is light at the end of the tunnel.

 

The football section? Oh, do you mean that thing I immediately tossed into the recycling bin with the classfieds? Kept you a little busy? Oh. Huh.

(sorry, I'm a mean old bastard.)

 

40 pages for 12 schools? Holy crap. That's insane.

 

Agree. Unless you've got 20 pages of ads, I'd cut that back by about 34 pages for next year.

 

Spnited and Ace: Agree, though THIS year, the ad department actually went out and sold ads, rather than simply accepted what was offered.

That's what happens when you get a new guy bucking for the ad director's chair to get the job of the former ad director, who was asscanned last month.

They more than doubled the ad inches from last year.

Joe: You nailed it, I'm afraid.

 

So how many pages of ads were in the section?

 

Ace: They sold ads for each school, then some general ones, too.

There's a strip ad on the cover, the back page is a full-page ad and of the other 38 pages, 35 of them have at least two ads on them.

 

Still WAY too much for only 12 schools. We increased from 36 to 44 last year with 65 schools in our area.

 

We're a state-wide paper and the section I just finished was eight open pages. And it was more than enough. Most readers won't have the patience to read a 36-page prep preview section; all that info likely will go to waste.