Now That I Have Your Attention

If in the last entry I made it clear the future for SIDs looks grim, let me follow with the bright land of opportunity that is before college sports media relations personnel.

Let's take the number of seven SIDs on a large university staff. Give that school 20 sports. Remember, in the past, they all basically did the same thing -- which made them interchangeable and had the benefit of scaling up and down when some huge occurrence happened (a national championship run or national event host).

One of them might be a little better with Photoshop. One might be a little stronger with InDesign. One could have an artistic eye. One probably understands HTML and web structure better. For the large part, however, they operated independently of each other, replicating the same tasks and perhaps leaning on the one person with knowledge to help out.

The Networked Media today requires a different set of advanced skills -- audio and video editing, multi-platform writing skill, ability to mesh multimedia into a coherent message.

Who on that SID staff had those abilities?

One of my famous lines (infamous if you were on the other end) from the SEC Spring Meetings back in the mid-1990s was the 14 people sitting around that table were the last of the analog SIDs and the future was digital. One person really got offended at that comment. He's no longer at that school, and not sure if he's still in the business.

And the future is now.

The new path is specialization within the media relations office. There remains a place for the traditional SID, but it is more PR based. Content generation becomes more important, and that's where the specialty comes in.

This is good and bad news. Sport-based specialty would lead to seasonal work. You had "off-season" between sports, or the summer. Just like coaches know at the high level, we've turned everything into 365.

Going back to those seven staffers, let's say three remain in the SID mode. They would work everything at home that required media interaction. They would set any media area -- from football to lacrosse. If external media are in attendance, they are there. This becomes more of the external spokesperson in PR.

A publications and graphic specialist would handle the printing (don't kid yourself, paper isn't going away). A video editor manages the packages for TV to internet. A still image specialist takes care of the photos and Photoshop. An on-line manager creates and manages internet spaces.

Well, there's your seven staff people. In a hurry, you're out of hands. Who is covering those 20 teams?

There are two answers: the same seven people with the sports divided up as beats, rather than the traditional SID roles. This is what I predict the majority of schools will do. It's simple and easy.

The savvy will find/create/hire another group to create content. Let's add three more staff people -- all of them "preditors" to cover the teams. These producer-editors can capture video, write stories and features and allow those specialists to do what you are paying them to do -- manage, amplify and maximize content.

It won't do any good for an institution to have a publications coordinator that is so swamped by the full load of the 20 sports AND covering two or three of the "minor" teams in the SID role. Two outcomes are possible: they will do middling work because they lack the time to give any one project more than the cursory attention or they will burn out and leave.

The preditors can be those student workers, eager to learn and enthusiastic about the sports. In this case, you probably need an eighth person -- a director/instructor to teach this pack of students. It requires the will to allow young people to make mistakes and learn from them.

In the end, this really should not be that surprising or shocking. No university or college PR office staffs up with nothing but PR spokespersons. No academic department is filled with only generalists, or with all the same specialty. There is only one U.S. diplomatic historian in the department; one Asian studies professor.