God, I love media guides.
When I was growing up, I somehow got regular copies of the Buffalo Sabres’ media guides. I assume my parents bought them for us. I poured over them the way most kids poured over SpiderMan comics. When I worked in sports information in college, I loved working on the media guides for each sport (Phil LaBella and Jared Paventi were the lucky ones. They got to design the women’s basketball media guides as their senior capstone project). As a college basketball guide, I relished collecting media guides at every stop on my beats.
It’s incredibly dorky to love media guides, so the fact that I have loved them my entire life is perfectly on brand.
I’ve been thinking about media guides a lot this week as part of a larger writing project I’m in the middle of. My friends Mike Harrington, Baxter Holmes and Tyler Dunne have all received incredibly random text messages and DMs from me about media guides. It turns out, MLB teams still print media guides. Some NFL and NBA teams do, although most of that information goes online now. NHL teams have moved all online, as have most colleges.
It makes total sense. Printing media guides is a huge expense. While printed guides do serve a purpose, they are by definition static items. A website is dynamic, and can be updated regularly. In a lot of ways (especially at a lot of colleges), big media guides were prestige items meant to convey status as much as be useful to reporters.
But here’s the crazy thing I found working on this project: Pro teams are still designing media guides the way they always did.
Here’s what I mean: Check out the Buffalo Sabres media guide. Or the Philadelphia 76ers.
These are roughly the same guides we reporters would have received in the mail 20 years ago. Same info as always. Same basic layout. Same sports dork’s dream. Only as a PDF instead of a printed copy.
Even with all the information available on the same website — in formats that are faster and easier to update and upload and share — the traditional media guide lives on.
Old habits die hard in media.
So do old loves.
Are you a gigantic media guide dork, too? Comment below with your favorite media guide of all time. And you can support this blog, keep it ad free, and support a fellow media guide dork at Ko-Fi below.