We've all been there.
I know I've been there.
It's 3 a.m. and you are hammering away at some killer game notes. Notes you - we - think are going to be used by the 
throngs of local, regional and national media at the next game, home or away. But to your dismay, those killer notes aren't used. Why?
It's 2011 and because of Twitter, we want tons information. Now. If not now, then fast. Easily. And to the point. Sometimes, the media doesn't have time to read your 100-page manifesto. In the beginning, our job was to make the media's job - gasp! - easier.
Writing a story about 'X' College and need a handful of quick, easy notes/bullets? A media member will either a) call/e-mail you for the answer(s) or b) go to your web site, call up your latest game notes and look for the best tidbits.
I go back to this phrase: making the media's job easier. It's not a scavenger hunt.
And that's the problem we face now. We have so many things at our finger tips to make our jobs easier to disseminate information to the media, fans and other constituencies. Do we really need to mow down a rain forest to produce information? It all goes back to what I blogged earlier this month...producing mountains of game notes and concentrating only on stats should be things of the past. Those are negative connotations to the SID title. Are 100-page notes really necessary? Hell, is another over 30 pages really necessary?
Game notes - among other topics - were briefly discussed this past summer in Marco Island. And I'm excited to have an opportunity to present this topic...or something similiar...next summer in St. Louis. And Chris Freet from Miami brought up a great point then - we need to study the return on investment on game notes. How much time do you invest? And how much of that information you put in your notes gets used?
I've been there at 3 a.m., battling insomnia and trying to finish an insane amount of game notes for a game that may have 10 people total - including myself - that may read them.
Many times, we've admitted that we put so much time and effort into game notes for us!
Instead of 50 pages of notes, cut it in half. Use the time that you would have exerted on the second half of notes on blogging for your web site. Take that information that you would have used and re-purpose for your site. Then tweet it. I guarantee that will get more views than had it been buried on page 37 of your notes.
I've taken great pride with what I've been able to accomplish with this season's football notes at Baylor. Yes, I do love designing things that look clean, simple and display a great example for Baylor University and Baylor Athletics. After the convention, I wanted to end all the time-wasting. So I cut our football notes by one-third (we were, at most, 40 pages last season). And I'm very conscious of the amount of graphics I place in the notes because that increases file size. Would media and fans rather download something that's 200 KB or 3 MB? I think art - whether action photos, headshots or graphics - add a nice touch to game notes and breaks up the text well. But you don't need to place a 6 MB photo in the notes because that'll translate to a much larger PDF file online. So I trim our art to web-ready sizes so that the PDF file size is minimal and easily attachable/downloadable via e-mail.
So we have the 17th-ranked football team in the nation and a big-time Heisman Trophy candidate. And once I receive a dress roster on Thursday, our notes will be 23 pages. That's double-sided. That's five pages of "notes," one page for the depth chart, two pages for career leaderboards, one page for said Heisman Trophy candidate, four pages for player spotlights, nine pages for notes and, right now, one page for recap notes (two games per page). Download size? 193 KB.
That's football. What about basketball? While I'm already thinking about what I'm going to do for this upcoming season, I can tell you that basketball notes can suck up a ridiculous amount of time and energy. So many games and you want to make sure every important thing gets in there. Not to mention a quick turnaround between games a lot of times. I've received numerous compliments on the game notes I assemble for basketball for these three reasons - the 10 "story line" bullets on the front page (that helped me win an award from the Louisiana Sportswriters Association in 2008...yes, shameless promotional plug), player pages and the TV/Radio flip card on the back page. Ideally, all the information the media needs are in those three sections. They shouldn't have to read anything else. And the best/most important stuff I put in my hoops notes? I post on my basketball blog and subsequently tweet it out. Short, quick good notes.
Media and (especially) fans have an insatiable appetite for immediate information. Where has our job to promote immediacy for this information gone?
It's time to save a small forest. And take back some of our precious time and re-purpose it to more useful areas, like blogging and social media. Let's face it: with social media, does the media really have time to scour 100 pages of notes to find 5-10 nuggets? Take the best of the best notes you have and push that content. Take out all the old information you kept pushing farther and farther back in your notes and hit the delete button.
And in reality, game notes make up just a small fraction of our jobs as athletics communicators. And it's not stats, either. We are historians for our respective athletic departments, but most importantly, we are the first and last lines of defense when it comes to crisis management. Think about that. Nowadays, crisis management has become an overwhelmingly large portion of our job. So why waste hours and hours and hours (and pages and pages and pages) of information in your game notes that will - gasp! - probably not be used when you could be helping promote and defend your program in other ways?
Keep it simple.
Less is more.
Truer words have never been spoken or, in this case, typed. Think of it like this: media messages are becoming more and more complicated and are flooding our communication channels with static and superfluous fluff. How do you block out the noise? Don't you want simplified information?
It's simple: less is more. Cut it down (notes, not trees).
Do we need to research the ROI on game notes? With the way our profession continues to evolve and adapt to the constantly changing times, it probably wouldn't hurt.