How long do you keep media guides?

That does surprise me, buck. Now, my run of MAD magazine softcover books ...

 

Those are gold.
Media guides? I'm like 21 and keep most all of them. But if you don't want them and can't or don't want to sell them, give them away to a youth group or something.

 

I keep the ones that have some strange curiosity, like La-Lafayette's football media guide from 1998 with Brandon Stokley on the cover playing with these plastic toy football players. Under Football 1998, it says "We're not playing around." Classic.

Or Florida's media guide from the Ron Zook era in 2003. That's a croc, not an alligator.



When I took this job four years ago, I cleaned out our stacks and stack and stacks of old media guides. There were so many I had to get a heavy cart from the press room to transport them to the dumpster. That reminds me, a cleaning session of our media guide shelf might be in order again when things get slow in the summer.

 

I hope management doesn't see this. They'll make you give it back.

Can't allow that nice of a severance package.

 

I came upon some old media guides a couple years ago and for whatever reason decided to stash them away in my home office rather than toss them.

Turns out a couple of them have been extremely useful in co-writing a documentary that will be airing publicly soon and in co-writing a book on the same topic as the documentary. Basically, helped me to double-check and look up a lot of facts so I didn't have to waste time on little things.

Never know when those can come in handy, although I suppose if you keep too many you might become a hoarder.

Either way, you can find everything online now, anyway, so may as well toss them.

 

I have a buddy who used to cover hockey for SportsTicker and is a hoarder. When I told him I was planning to toss the guides, he asked me to save them to him, even though he already has most, if not all, of them.

Dude told me he even saved press notes from the hundreds of games he covered.

 

Wow, that's going pretty far.

Considering how many notes they hand out these days, he must have a separate home to store all that shit. My favorite is college basketball, when they hand you an updated box after every single stoppage in play. That's all just wasted paper. Gimme the halftime stats and the final game summary. That's it. If I'm too lazy to take notes and watch the game and don't know what's going on the whole time that I need stats every 10 seconds, then I probably suck anyway. I can see why TV/radio people may need all that stuff, but not writers.

I'll save game notes for a little bit sometimes, because they may come in handy in the near future. But usually every so often I go through my office stuff and just throw away all that crap.

I know people who save press passes as a sort of memento or whatever, I still keep some of those lying around from some of the more memorable games I've covered.