Unfortunately, although we were in our rental car to the Denver airport at 4:07 a.m., and on the first plane by just at 6 a.m., it was dark by the time we got back to Etna. One canceled flight, one flight that we couldn't get on, and almost eight hours of waiting at O'Hare for a flight to Hartford, Conn., contributed mightily to an 18 1/2-hour door-to-door trip.
Cruising around my usual haunts this morning, I found something of interest going on at Princeton. The school that traditionally turned out what I thought were among the very best press guides in the Ivy League is going to stop printing them. Period. They will still be produced, but instead of being printed they will be posted on the school website as PDFs. From a Princeton release:
“The state of the economy has forced every segment of intercollegiate athletics to evaluate their priorities,” says Director of Athletics Gary Walters. “We feel that we have found the right direction for our players, fans, coaches, supporters and prospective athletes.”There's a column about the move on the TigerBlog site.
Princeton will not be creating guides and then posting them to the Web in pdf form as solely a cost-cutting measure. Princeton will have all of the information that would have been contained in its guides available on-line, though in a more easily accessible format.
Green Alert Take: I don't disagree with the varied reasons for the decision to go electronic, as explained thoroughly in the column. But I do have a couple of concerns.
First, as a media member I don't need a media guide printed on glossy stock with four-color covers. Never have. But I do need something I can hold in my hands, peruse when I'm not at a computer, and mark up with a highlighter. I suppose I could print 10 opposing guides at home, but that could run upwards of $20 of ink per guide, not to mention wear and tear on the printer. So my first suggestion for Princeton or any school thinking of going in the same direction would be to print up a number of guides on regular copy paper and make them available to media members. Somehow I just don't see writers for the AP or ESPN.com sending PDFs off to the office printer for every school that goes electronic. But I can see them filing away something for later reference that arrives in the mail.
I'm also concerned whether schools that go electronic will keep older guides available online. I have every Dartmouth football media guide dating back to 1980 sitting on a shelf five feet from where I am typing this. If I have a question, I turn to my right and can find an answer. I know those guides will always be there, but will the 2009 media guide PDF still be online in 2020? I don't know.
In a similar vein, it used to be that every school compiled and mailed out a spring/summer football prospectus. Now they are all electronic, if they are done at all. Perhaps I simply haven't been able to find them online, but this year I've only been able to dig up a prospectus for four of Dartmouth's 10 opponents: Yale, Penn, Holy Cross and Colgate.
And finally, three Dartmouth opponents have debuted new and cleaner designs for their websites. Check out the football websites for Brown, Harvard and Colgate.
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