NCAA bracket on the front?

[Sam Mills 51]

At least a half page - inside. Put story of local school(s) up front with photo and NCAA refer. If no local school in the tourney, then an overview and jump inside to the page(s) with brackets.

 

[shotglass]

Anyone use helmets?

Rack 'im. ;)

BTW, why does it have to be on the front page to be in color? heh-heh.

 

[Batman]

It's probably different now, in the Internet age, when you can print out a decent bracket no problem. But I'd bet that back in the day the papers that ran the half-page bracket outsold those that ran the quarter-page bracket 2-to-1 today.

 

[BTExpress]

It's probably different now, in the Internet age, when you can print out a decent bracket no problem. But I'd bet that back in the day the papers that ran the half-page bracket outsold those that ran the quarter-page bracket 2-to-1 today.

Whatever size fits best on the most copy machines is the best size to run it.

 

[shotglass]

Also remember to place it on the outside of the page so it's easier to access with scissors...

 

[playthrough]

Anyone else see the NYT sports front today? (or if it's being discussed on another thread, let me know) It was a Periodic Table of elements, NCAA-tourney style, organized by conference, RPI and seed. Pretty interesting and certainly different, being that it's not bracket-ish at all.

 

[Blitz]

Smaller papers tend to occasionally stick in on the front.
Most, though, put it somewhere inside.

And you always run into the prospect of the NCAA women wanting equal coverage with THEIR bracket.
It's best to put them both inside.

 

[gottawrite]

At a small paper, it is often best to make it the main art on the cover. If you have four pages and lots of local copy, you're going to have room for one story (AP's general story reworked to lead with the local team or teams) and one piece of art (the bracket). I usually looked for ways to put it inside, but often the add stack and dedicated inside pages made it really difficult to place it on an inside page.

 

[hockeybeat]

I thought Tiger was a bigger story on Sunday. He put the finishing touches on his fifth straight tour win, after coming from seven back. Make him the cover and move the bracket with AP and local--if you have a team in the tourney--stories inside.

 

[HejiraHenry]

I thought Tiger was a bigger story on Sunday. He put the finishing touches on his fifth straight tour win, after coming from seven back. Make him the cover and move the bracket with AP and local--if you have a team in the tourney--stories inside.

Respectfully disagree, at least about the part where you push your local NCAA story inside.

To start with, the local NCAA lead should be on A1. If it's not, then your newspaper isn't really delivering on a local sports commitment.

Your sports front, then, ought to complement that A1 story, with player reax or whatever.

That doesn't exclude Tiger from the mix – or the other significant sunday event this time of year, the NASCAR race du jour.

 

[shotglass]

Tiger's a great story, but it's a running story. It was the NCAA's time. That was the main play.

But not the bracket on the front. That's not the way to handle a 4x7 graphic, even a much-utilized one.

 

[Mizzougrad96]

If the local interest is strong enough, should a newspaper put the NCCA bracket on the front of Monday's section? Or is that a waste of space?

What are people talking about the day after selection Sunday other than the bracket?

If you live in a college hoops hotbed, absolutely put it out front...

 

[Mizzougrad96]

We're putting it inside on a doubletruck. We sell ads for it every year.

I'm doing an illustration out front.

Every paper I've worked at has done that. It's one of the easiest ad sells of the year and it runs every day for three weeks... It brings in a ton of ad revenue...

 

[shotglass]

If the local interest is strong enough, should a newspaper put the NCCA bracket on the front of Monday's section? Or is that a waste of space?

What are people talking about the day after selection Sunday other than the bracket?

If you live in a college hoops hotbed, absolutely put it out front...

You may be doing big-boy writing, but your section-planning acumen is pure Hicksville USA.

 

[Ace]

Anyone else see the NYT sports front today? (or if it's being discussed on another thread, let me know) It was a Periodic Table of elements, NCAA-tourney style, organized by conference, RPI and seed. Pretty interesting and certainly different, being that it's not bracket-ish at all.

I liked that. I thought it was interesting and actually easier to digest in lots of ways than a bracket.

Most of their graphics leave me scratching my head, though.

 

[BTExpress]

The problem with the bracket is that, by definition, it is 70 percent white space (caused by the necessity of shrinking 65 teams to 1, and the expanding empty space on each side of the bracket as it closes toward the middle). That makes it a terrible choice for front page presence.

If it is possible to create one eliminating that extra space (which obviously could not be used for filling out office pools), then it could be a compelling front-page item. But it would take some imagination to do it right.

 

[shotglass]

Very astute, BTE. That is the trick.

If anyone tackles making their own, that's where a lot of the energy needs to be concentrated. Leave just barely enough space to fill in names of winners for those people who do that sort of thing.

 

[jps]

ran it a full color page inside with locally created bracket, background, etc. Women, despite the fact that there is really just that one reader out there that will call and complain about 'fairness' was also a color inside, but scaled back to about little less than half page.

No need to put it on the front -- not including it would be bad, obviously, and cause an uproar. But readers don't really care that it's on the front or on page 12, as long as they can find it and, more importantly, use it.

(Hell, they are just gonna print off their bracket from SI, Yahoo, AOL, or wherever anyway.)

 

[middleman]

I worked up this on our front last year after my editor asked to put it on the cover. He told late in the day the Friday before and I was scheduled to be off that weekend. This is what I came up with (it's the first page here). It's a little hard to read but had kind of faded illo in the back ground of Oden, etc., so it was still very readable. I still don't know how I feel about it being out there. We didn't do it this year, did something much different.

http://www.newspagedesigner.com/portfolios/portfolio1.php?UserID=7175