Thursday, June 08, 2006

Lighting a Candle

To not be accused of simply cursing the dark, here's my broad outline on press guides:
1) Bring back the recruiting brochure. Face it, this is what coaches want; they just want it specific to their team. So they won't like a single department wide document. (Neither would any larger university, which has one for each division or college). OK, the limit would be so many total pages in two publications. Tossing out some numbers, 64 total pages that can either be used as one departmental publication or broken into two focused publications. For example -- men's and women's sports; fall and spring sports; "revenue" and "olympic" sports.
But what keeps that from being a 64-page football recruiting brochure?
2) Remove the media guide from the permissible recruiting items. Now, the press guides can return to their original intent --without restrictions on pages. This allows schools to return to proper chronicalling of their past and records and provide the reference material the media needs. I don't think the net effect on budgets will be any significant increase in cost, and it will provide a dramatic change in service. The media doesn't want a seven-page coaches bio; recruiting coordinators don't want year-by-year scores.
No more 15,000 copy runs of football guides -- a huge savings that pays for (or the vast majority of the cost) the recruiting brochures.
Most of the media guides could be print-on-demand jobs to meet the needs of the press (another significant cost cutter).
And, recruits could go get that additional record-oriented stuff on-line.
Discuss.

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