Charles Apple

I’ve not tried to sell a free-lance graphic since last year’s Super Bowl project. I enjoyed putting together the pieces, but they really haven’t sold so well. Other than the first one, I mean.

Editors have told me repeatedly they like the work I’m doing and they like the fact that I’m giving them choices — and, better yet, taking approaches not covered by the Associated Press or the other wire services. However, editors have said they have neither the newshole nor the free-lance budget to consider my pitches.

Which is fair enough. After four free-lance offerings last winter, I turned my attention to other matters so it was no great loss.

When I returned from Africa on Dec. 1, though, I immediately dove into assembling what’s an annual project for me: A pull-out guide to the college football bowl games.

In 1997 — I was in my second year at the Chicago Tribune – I was suddenly struck by the silliness of running a huge page of dry, text-driven capsules on an interesting topic like college bowls. So I suggested we try it as an easy-reference grid instead, so readers might pull out the page and keep it around for a while.

To my delight, someone — as I recall, it was Joe Knowles, who’s now AME of design and graphics at the Trib — said yes:

The idea is pretty simple, as you can see. The dates run down the left side. All the games are listed in chronological order. You get the game time and TV information as well as team logos, records and a nice writeup on each game.

Notice there were “only” 21 bowl games back then. This gave me room for tiny little photos and mug shots.

After two years of building this page for the Tribune, I became graphics editor of the Des Moines Register. Naturally, I took my idea with me and Randy Brubaker — at the time, the Register’s sports editor — was delighted use it.

And we did use the idea. For five years, beginning in 1999. Here are the pages from 2000 and 2002:

When I moved to the Virginian-Pilot in 2003, I ported over the idea yet again. Here are the bowl pages from 2003 and 2005:

Note how as the number of bowls increased, the page got a little more dense. Good-bye photos.

Last year — my first in 22 years not on staff at a paper somewhere — I offered up the page on a free-lance basis. Three papers bought it. Left to right: The Rockford (Ill.) Register-Star, the Baltimore Sun…

…and the tabloid-sized sports section of the Harrisburg (Pa.) Patriot News:

As you can see, I tried to break up some of that denseness with white space.

After twelve years of building these puppies, I hated to not even try to get someone to run this graphic. I feel strongly it’s still a great way to present this information.

So willing to sacrifice price-per-piece for more individual sales this year, I lowered my price — really, to get a better feel for the free-lance market — and sent out a few dozen e-mail solicitations.

The result: Five papers — so far, anyway — are running this year’s bowl guide.

The Gazette of Gastonia, N.C. and the Shelby, N.C. Star were the first. They ran theirs this past Thursday:

Notice how I left space for a strip ad across the bottom. I think Shelby and Gastonia put a small story there instead. That’s the six-column version.

Two papers are running the four-column variant today, and both are papers where I once worked: The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C. and the Des Moines Register. This is the N&O version, with fonts converted to Interstate:

And a large paper out west is scheduled to run the four-column version on Sunday.

In addition, I’ve suggested to editors they could slice off the expired games and run a portion of this piece on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, when papers typically have huge chunks of paper to fill with holiday staffing. We’ll see if we have any late customers this time around.

As an exclusive for my blog readers, though, here’s a handy PDF version that’s optimized for easy printing on two horizontal letter-sized pages. Just in case you live in an area where the local paper didn’t buy my graphic.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 19th, 2009 at 8:33 am and is filed under Free-lance, Graphics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.