It's a horse eat horse world. . . .

OK, so I had my first Scoop anxiety dream last night. I had (for some unknown reason) been away from school and when I returned the students proudly presented me with the magazine in its final stage -- ready to send to the printer. Imagine my surprise when not only were most of the stories about horses (breeding horses, horse racing, what to feed horses, and so forth), but every department title had changed -- from our once "Circle" and JEM-related names to seemingly random monikers, including: "dads and their daughters" (the story was two diary entries written by one of the students in the class about how much she hated her father); "it's the night life" (which was a series of extremely similar looking and slightly blurry photos of Knoxville at night taken from a helicopter -- no kidding, in my dream the copy under the photos actually said that); and my personal favorite, "blini" (which by all accounts was not actually about tiny pancakes at all, but again, of course, was about horses).

Perhaps I shouldn't have had that glass of chardonnay before I went to bed after all....

Ad Sales

Ad sales are coming along. We're thrilled with the ads we have sold so far. At the same time, we worry about selling enough ads to publish this magazine.

Right now we're trying to raise money for Scoop's premiere issue, which will come out in April. There's a lot of pressure on us to sell these ads because without them there will be no premiere issue of Scoop.

It's tough not having an actual product to show potential advertisers, but we do have some layout samples so people can get a feel for the design, and we have a sample cover to show. They rock. We've got some people who get really excited about design so Scoop is going to look amazing.

The samples were created last semester and presented at a faculty meeting for the School of Journalism and Electronic Media. We got a lot of support from the faculty after the meeting and I think everyone is excited about this magazine's first issue.

Let's hope we can get enough advertisers interested to see this through. So much work has been done so far, and a lot of blood, sweat and tears have been shed. It'd be a shame to let a thing like money get in the way of our success.

The magazine will be 60 pages long, with 20 pages of ads. It's a pretty good ad/edit ratio and I'm so glad we didn't have to go 50/50 as we once feared. We'll be presenting our work to JEM alumni and students on glossy 80 lbs. stock using only the finest four-color process printing. Our ad rates are good for that kind of quality. And Scoop will be mailed to our alumni and current students, so an ad is guaranteed to be seen by 5,000 people. We'll keep the remaining copies prospective students and friends of the School. If you're interested in buying an ad, please contact our faculty advisor at: clepre@utk.edu.

Scoop layouts