So how's your tab coming?

[wisportswriter]

We couldn't sell the tab enough any longer, so for the past few years we've done a preview series, one conference a day leading up to the season opener.

Once you get over the fact you're not making any extra coin for the paper, it's actually pretty nice. The work is much more spread out - you're not doing it all for one deadline. And for the later schools - we save the city schools for last - you can get some much more updated information into the stories.

The tradeoff is, for the reader, it's not all in one neat package like the tab.

 

[SouthernStyle]

Finished!!!!! Thank Goodness. Pulled two 15-our shifts and believe my vision is permanently blurred. Gonna go drink a beer or two … or 15 right now and see if that corrects the problem.

 

[schiezainc]

Got an email from our publisher saying someone from sports needs to be at the editorial meeting Monday to discuss special projects coming up. Have my fingers crossed that there won't be a tab, but I guess we'll see.

 

[bumpy mcgee]

just found out today ads hasn't put ads on pages/designed ads, so they're doing it monday. hopefully we don't lose a lot of design time on the day before the tab is due because of ads.
i mean they only knew the production schedule a month ago, so we shouldn't be mad, right?

 

[2muchcoffeeman]

Ours came in at 120+ pages (I have no idea what the actual count is, not my department). All the copy was done two weeks ago. Last weekend was spent proofing. The inside half was printed today with the rest to roll tomorrow. It hits the stands this Sunday, the last one before the season kicks off.

Jesus Christ. How do you fill 120 pages?

who would possibly want to read 120 pages?

Per his profile, he's from Texas. They'll read it.

 

[spikechiquet]

No clue how long or how hard it was...my SE moved the date up and did it all himself, minus the stories I wrote.
Should I be mad? I mean, on one hand, he bounced me out of it completly, on the other hand...I didn't have to do **** for it! LOL

 

[BigJim5190]

I'm jealous of you guys for getting it done. I've been circling the runway for about a month because practices don't start until next week around here. I have about 10 previews done already, but expect the bulk of them to come in this weekend and next week. I'll be scrambling.

Stories due a week from today. Week to edit and lay it out. Send it. Start covering games. Phew.

 

[jps]

Ours came in at 120+ pages (I have no idea what the actual count is, not my department). All the copy was done two weeks ago. Last weekend was spent proofing. The inside half was printed today with the rest to roll tomorrow. It hits the stands this Sunday, the last one before the season kicks off.

Jesus Christ. How do you fill 120 pages?

who would possibly want to read 120 pages?

Per his profile, he's from Texas. They'll read it.

yeah, if you've never been through you just don't probably understand. but they'll read it in one sitting and then you'll have a voice mail in the morning asking why you didn't have more.

 

[tapintoamerica]

I seriously didn't think anybody did tabs anymore.

 

[EagleMorph]

80 pager due out a week before the first game. Finishing up my writing this weekend.

 

[apeman33]

I have one of the three rural schools's surveys in. That school is the one in the same county as the major school, so that's OK.

If we end up doing just pages within and the two farther out schools don't respond, I may just drop them. They're both in the county north of us and I don't honestly think current ownership gives much thought to that county. As far as I know, there's no place in that county where we sell the paper off the rack. You want it up there, you have to subscribe and it's mail only. In the promotional flyers, the ad reps only speak of the two in-county schools, so it's not like there will be any ads from the businesses in the other county anyway.

 

[HejiraHenry]

Knee-deep doesn't begin to describe it. Looks like (no more than) a 48-page tab.

Interesting experience. Hit all the deadlines, tab gets printed and distributed ... and many of them have a least a few pages that, due to press trouble, are basically unreadable. Big Boss Man says, "print it again, insert it again." Costly decision (35K copies), but the right one. None of us wants to see that happen again.

 

[JakeandElwood]

I just have one more story and some capsules to do.

 

[doggieseatdoggies]

We were told to cut back the size, do capsules on perimeter teams, focus on the 10-15 core teams and we dropped four pages off last year's section. Suddenly, the other day, advertising gives us the original page count. 12-page sections also totally screwed up the color, meaning from our original plan, most of the big schools will get black and white pages and all but one color page is going to be jumps.

I'm sick of this - sick of presenting a plan to the ad staff chief four months in advance and having one of her goons come to me two weeks before deadline asking what our plan is, themes, etc., when no one has looked at the detailed email I sent in the spring, or they would have known. I try to get those to them in plenty of time to get feedback on possible promo tie-ins and ad campaigns. Last year they promised ads on team pages which was a cluster****. The preview was paginated and repaginated twice because the ads were in the wrong place. We had no order on the teams, which we usually do by class. The ad chief said, "next year we need to go to a tabloid." Great idea. Fewer color issues and easy layouts for "team pages." Do they hold to it, hell no. It's broadsheet city.

Our whole staff wants to say eff you to the whole idea of a section. No one outside us gives a **** about quality, or a plan. They'd scramble five pages to get a one-inch ad in post-deadline. It's a zoo. It's been something like this for four straight years. It always messes up any final proof go-over.

 

[schiezainc]

Doogie, if it makes you feel any better, I'll share my ads department story with you.

Our winter all-area tab was a clusterf**k. So, naturally, I wanted the spring one to roll smoothly. Literally from the time the winter one went to press until the week before the spring one was set to launch (Something like three months), I would go into the ad boss' office at least once-twice per week and make sure she had all the details (Eight page section, broadsheet, strip ads across the bottom, all in color, section would be simply added to our pages).

Exactly two days before we have to have it done, ad lady starts panicking. Apparently, the part about it being added into our section didn't sink in (despite the weekly reminders).

For it to run as a part of our section, we would have needed a minimum of 12 pages in the sports section that week for all our papers (Two pages fresh news, eight page special section, two pages for community news/obits). That means, thanks to our company policy of matching, that the "A" section would also have to be 12 pages.

Well, no one from ads told the news folks that. And despite the fact that I told each news editor this once a week for three months as well, it gets decided that we can't have it be part of the paper, meaning that in addition to all the work we had to do to finish this on time, we had to go out and find two-three more pages of local copy per paper...that day.

Boy, was that fun.

From that point on, I've decided to start planning for every conceivable way the ads department can screw up. I tell them this on a regular basis, though they think I'm joking because I'm such a nice guy.

Ads departments-> You can't live with them, but if push comes to shove, your ass is gone before theirs.

 

[doggieseatdoggies]

Yeah, but they suck, and so does the mind-set that the people buying the ads don't care about what kind of piece-of-**** package their ad is put in for the kind of money they pay to run it in the publication in the first place. We're clueless.

I will not put out another publication without some set guidelines. No news supplement ever is as screwed up as ours is. I'll go fry burgers before that happens. My BP cannot take it. It takes me a week to relax after the stress caused by nothing more than incompetence.

 

[doggieseatdoggies]

And for your extra three pages, I would have solved it with picture pages, with fine print at the bottom explaining why. But that's just me.

 

[2underpar]

we put our high school tab to bed Thursday. It printed and will run tomorrow. Now, it's on to the 16-page college broadsheet.

 

[Rumpleforeskin]

Printed today and it looks good.

 

[Den1983]

Our retail ad manager was relieved of her duties last week. Prior to that, they had yet to sell an ad. The tab is scheduled to run to press on Thursday, and we're supposed to get dummies on Wednesday. To say the next three days will be interesting is putting it lightly.