Football tabs

[SFIND]

We were talking around the office today about football previews. We haven't done them here since 2012, and I don't think any of the staff misses them.

When I first starting working in the industry last decade, four writers worked on the preview, three photographers took all pictures. The desk took care of all design/layout, and there were numerous salesmen who sold ads for it. In the last few years we produced it, I was one of two writers who had to do most of the work (it was 24 pages broadsheet). It was a major project to accomplish in about three weeks time, on top of all other normal duties. We had to write every article, take 80% of the pictures, and lay out the entire thing. The ad staff was also slashed over the years, and I think the last year we did the preview, there was only one guy selling it.

We now just do a preview a day in the sports section leading up to first Friday. It's much easier.

Who out there still does them? I'm sure plenty still do, but I can't think of any paper in our surrounding counties that does them. The area's major metro and the smaller papers all around us have stopped doing them in the last five years.

 

[Liut]

Hearty congrats to you SFIND and your colleagues. I. Will. Hate. Tabs. For. The. Rest. Of. My. Life.

 

[Kayaugstin Kott]

We do. The reporter does the reporting; editor does the page design; ad team sells ads; photographers take the photos. It works fine, and probably sells more copies of the paper than any other day of the year.

That situation you were in is unfortunate.

 

[HejiraHenry]

We do, but there's still a business underpinning for that - we're able to sell ad adjacencies to perhaps two dozen of the 50 or so high schools in our coverage area.
Our classified staff sells those - and they're very good at it.
We wind up with a 48-page tab with enough room for a handful of additional features.
The writing duties are spread across 11 or 12 writers - two guys from our staff, writers from our weeklies and a couple of stringers.
It's a decent production task, but not miserable.

 

[spadjo martin]

We still do a special high school football section. 56 tab pages. 31 teams. Straight previews. One centerpiece. Three of us do the bulk of the writing. I farm out the outlying schools to a couple of part-timers and one freelancer. I guess it makes money because we keep doing it. Apparently it is very well read because we start getting phone calls once practice starts wondering when it publishes. The downfall is that where we are at, practice starts the first Monday of August and games start the third week of August. It has forced us to do more before the teams officially start practice, especially with photography.

 

[JohnHammond]

Tabs are alright if you can get better photos than just team photos. A ton of work, but they bring in revenue.

 

[Batman]

We've switched to a magazine format that's been pretty well received. It looks better, too. The downside is that since we can't print it on our press it has to be sent off and deadlines have moved up.
Way up.
The deadline for copy this year was July 31. Practice started Aug. 3. The thing went off to the printer's today.
We had some wiggle room for getting mugs and team pictures, and all of our schools had early picture days, thank goodness. It's eliminated any chance of getting our outlying schools in, though. By the time they have picture day it's too late, and they're all 30-45 minutes away so it's difficult to justify making more than one trip. We hit them as we can and work them into the regular section the week or so before the first game.

 

[YorksArcades]

Complete waste of paper and staff time.

 

[MNgremlin]

This is our first year not doing a football (or volleyball) tab. We'll be doing pull-outs instead, two teams a day.

 

[jr/shotglass]

Gearing up for 20-page broadsheet in two weeks. Enjoy doing it more than anything else I do during the year.

 

[Kayaugstin Kott]

Complete waste of paper and staff time.

Why?

Lots of ads are sold. It's a reference guide for the fans/coaches/players and even yourself. It's gratifying to see your work displayed in such a product. It establishes credibility.

If you have a reporter strictly assigned to do prep football, and freed up in the summer, why not?

 

[Bradley Guire]

It's cut down from what the staff did last year (before I came on). Last year, three tabs: an NCAA D-I team, an NAIA D-II team, then 20-something high schools. The HS tab with 28 pages and four ads.

This year, everything in one tab. I get about 10 pages for high schools, each team with a half page. Each team gets a file photo, 150 words, two 100-word player profiles. Haven't heard about actual ad sales. Ad deadline is the 14th.

 

[SoloFlyer]

Local shop has fallen on hard times - I think the sports staff is half of what it was 10 years ago - but they still do a dedicated preview. Haven't seen a tab format in recent years but it's usually a couple extra sections. Bunch of big photos done in an almost magazine cover style, a couple big time features and then a team preview for each school.

Appears to sell well. Decent number of ads. And it looks good. So kudos to them. I think if it's of value like that, you should do it, especially in those areas where high school football is a big part of the community.

 

[JackReacher]

I always dreaded the lead-up to football tab time, but for whatever dumb reason, I seemed to actually enjoy putting it together. Fortunately, I worked with people willing to go beyond the standard "team photo, 12-inch story on the team's best player" template.

 

[MeanGreenATO]

This will be the first year we will not be publishing a tab and a good amount of readers are upset that we won't do it. We had a massive one at my last shop. It took a ton of hours and effort to produce, but it was highly satisfying to put out great work that people enjoyed.

 

[Bronco77]

The papers in my area still produce broadsheet special football sections and do a good job with them -- although, like most sections in the paper, they're about half as large as they were 10 years ago.

At my former paper, I was the lead copy editor on the football section several times in the late '90s and remember what a massive undertaking it was. My memories are fuzzy, but I think it hit 40 pages a few times, covering everything from preps to the NFL. It was flattering to be designated as the copy editor on those sections, but after the first day of editing I'd be asking myself what the hell I'd gotten into and wondering when the deluge of copy would end. There'd usually be an all-nighter or two as deadline approached. And readers did like it -- we'd start getting phone calls in early August asking when the section would appear.

 

[HejiraHenry]

Complete waste of paper and staff time.

Yes, I also request that you defend that proposition.

 

[YorksArcades]

With organization and planning, you could do the same type of thing in the daily edition. Run a schedule showing the days each team's summary will appear. This way, you are not wasting huge amounts of paper, and you are promoting several daily editions, rather than just one.

You're still using staff time, but it's spread out in a more sensible fashion.

I realize this eliminates the chances for the ingeniously themed covers and other silliness, but we can't have it all.

 

[apeman33]

We still do it but I'm not sure why. Our coverage area has shrunk to the point where we only cover two high schools that play football. And the ad sales have been shifted to the person who does classifieds. Why, I don't know.

Last year, I had a 12-page tab. Discounting the cover and that I make page two an agate page covering last year's standings and complete league schedules, to fill the other 10 pages I had to put in previews of the middle school football teams (which the publisher wrote for me because he's the one with the passion to get the middle schools in and he's willing to do it) and use AP previews for the Chiefs, Kansas and Kansas State.

This year, we don't have AP. We dropped it last November. And now the head of advertising is saying they'd like me to have it done by August 28. I'd rather it be out Sept. 2 so that it comes out the Wednesday before the season starts (no Thursday paper here). Why the 28th? Apparently to pad the bottom line for the month because they want it to "bill in August." Although that would allow me to include the juco football team for the first time in a a few years because Kansas jucos have been starting the last Saturday of August for the past few years, which was a week too early for the tab. This would be also two weeks before the middle schools start, so they're out.

So I don't know if this year's tab might be better or worse. And I think I might try to persuade them that maybe this is the last year we should do it.

 

[TyWebb]

This is our first year not doing a football (or volleyball) tab. We'll be doing pull-outs instead, two teams a day.

Volleyball tab? Can't say I've ever heard of that.