Producing Effective Game Notes for Media and Broadcast

Game notes are an essential part of each of our jobs. Every athletics communications professional is putting out some version of a pre-game release packet before each event, but the reality is that very few people actually put out a document in a useable format that is helpful to all media outlets covering the event, or even useable for the communications professional him/herself.

I have seen 50-page notes packages without one tidbit of useful information or information in a useable format. Here’s the thing communications professionals need to keep in mind: It doesn’t matter how good of a notes package you believe it to be, if it’s not effective in helping media personnel do their jobs, then you might as well not have done it in the first place. It’s your job to promote your program and assist those giving you coverage.

Seek feedback from the media on what things are helpful in your notes and what things are not. Check with your team radio personnel, see what things they like from the notes of opponents you play. Ask your local beat writer and student beat writer what is most important to them.

A television broadcast of your game is always probably going to be the medium that draws the most in-game attention for your program. That is where you are exposing your program to fans and recruits alike. So why wouldn’t you want to make your notes the most usable for television talent? That’s two-plus hours of non-stop promotion of your program. Don’t you want the talent and production crew to have easy-to-use information so that they can talk about all of the things you want to emphasize about your program?

One of the most useful things I find in helping TV talent is to get a DVD of each of your games that is televised. Watch it afterwards from start to finish. Make note of what things from your notes television seems to like to use and what things it seems to never use. Make sure you continue to do the things that you find them using and try to include in your notes things you see on the broadcast and aren’t using. This is critical to successful promotion of your program.

Here’s a few keys to great game notes:

CHARTS CONTROL TV GRAPHICS: Have a lot of charts included in your game notes. All-time career lists, national individual rankings, comparisons from last year to this year, improvements, streaks and trends - all that stuff is clutch. What many athletics communications professionals fail to understand is that charts can directly be translated into TV graphics by the font coordinator. The more useful charts you include in your notes (knowing what TV is looking for), the more opportunity you have as your team’s publicist to control the graphics that appear on your game broadcast. Include all useful charts you can think of. Just because someone could extrapolate the data from the conference release or the NCAA data doesn’t mean you shouldn’t include it in your notes - do the work for them and you will find more graphics to your liking during your game broadcast.

KEY FRONT PAGE: Put the absolute most important information on your front page. I suggest a narrative summary of three or so paragraphs setting the stage for the game - sometimes that is something that radio or TV broadcasters can just lift and use in the opening of their broadcast. Gives you a good opportunity to get your message across in those parts of the broadcast as well. Also, I suggest a “quick notes” section based on easy-to-read and highly useful, yet succinct information. This is the MOST important information about your program. Just think - what are the 8-10 most important things about your team for the upcoming game. Make this very stat heavy and very tightly written - these are the most important points you want to get across or watch for. The writers will also find this helpful, as far as things to focus on for their upcoming stories and it will often tip off a note or a record that might happen during the game.

STREAKS AND TRENDS: Make the majority of your notes about streaks and trends. A wishy-washy and very wordy four-paragraph note about someone’s individual performance in one game alone is absolutely useless. It doesn’t apply to the current game, it doesn’t signify any trend in performance, it doesn’t identify any records and, for all intensive purposes, is absolutely useless. Things that people can watch for: trends of the wins, trends of the losses, consistent improvement, trends over the last five games, game comparisons, statistical streaks your team is on. These are the things that will make broadcasts, these are the things that will prove useful in your post-game notes, these are the things that will most help the writers. If you aren’t doing this, start immediately. This is one of the only things that really matters as far as information is concerned.

GET RID OF THE RECAPS IN THE NOTES: I am a big proponent of the “game recaps” section of notes with complete box scores. I think this is essential in helping media looking back at past games for “last-time” type of things and comparing games during the season. But it needs to be in the back section of your notes and it doesn’t need to show up anywhere else in your main notes section. Recapping games or series in the heart of your notes section is both useless and counterproductive. That’s not what TV or radio talent is looking for, especially if it is in lengthy narrative form. This type of information just bogs down your notes and makes it really hard to find the things you really need during the course of a game or broadcast. This is a huge inconvenience and often makes people stop referencing your notes altogether because it becomes too tiring to sift through all the general recap fluff that is weighing down your primary notes section.

ORGANIZATION IS KEY: Think about being on the air trying to look up something really quick. You also have to keep the TV official stats and talent stats personnel in mind when doing your notes. They are going to be looking things up on the fly during the game, with announcers and producers shouting in their ears the whole time. It has to be easy and quick to find. To intersperse series notes, team notes, individual notes, etc., makes it nearly impossible to find anything quickly. Have an order to the notes - I suggest: game information, series information, team notes, individual notes, team almanac, updated bios, game recaps and statistics. Bullet points and charts are key. The easier something is to read on the fly, the more likely it is to find its way into the broadcast. It needs to be easy to access and succinct. Those lengthy narrative paragraphs that are in so many people’s notes are absolutely useless, especially for broadcast personnel during the game.

BIOS, BIOS, BIOS: I can’t get over the number of people who don’t include updated player bios in their notes. This is essential for broadcast personnel AND, maybe more importantly, it helps you as the SID answer questions that the media has about each player and helps you with your own recap and post-game notes. A good bio has an updated season summary (three-dot data …), a couple of key “what to watch for” bullet points, game-by-game stats, career stats, season highs and career highs. This is essential. Also, make sure the first few lines of the player bio are streaks and trends (how many games they have played in/started, and some information like “ranks third on the team in scoring with 13.4 ppg” that summarizes their contributions to the team. Bios that are only a summary of what has happened every game without any beginning summary of why that player is important to the team and what they are doing this season are much less useful. Also, with the summarizing of each game part of the bio summary, be sure to have the most current game near the top and summarize, in reverse order, back down to the first game of the season.

ROSTER, PRONUNCIATION GUIDE, RADIO/TV CHART: These should be a given as to why they are essential and important, but you’d be surprised looking at some notes.

OFF-THE-COURT/FIELD IDEAS: One of many things I have learned from the great Susan Lax - it’s really important to have a section of off-the-court/field story ideas in your game notes. This is stuff that you can start by pulling information from the player questionnaires at the beginning of the year and add to it as you hear interesting tidbits on the bus, in the airport or when you are talking to players. Talk about how your player is a great chef or loves solving algorithms or comes from a family of 13 people, all of whom played some sport at your school. These always get positive reviews from TV types and are often helpful to writers looking for feature story ideas. These should be organized by player and should be in bulleted form.

UPDATED RECORD BOOK: Essentially, your entire record book should be updated in each set of notes. It sounds exhausting, but it’s really less tiring than having to update the whole thing at the end of the year and trying to go on memory. Plus, it helps you out immensely when answering media questions at games and putting together your post-game notes. If you rely on the media guide records, you have to find where the performance in that game ranks all time, then figure out if any performances from earlier in the season also belong on the list, and then re-organize the entire list. When doing this on deadline or in a pinch, it’s easy to make mistakes. You don’t want that to happen, and, really, you don’t need the extra stress or work that not doing this causes.

Those are just some key pointers, in my opinion, in how to put together really effective game notes that assist members of the media, especially broadcast media, in better covering your team. I think you’ll find that doing these things will result in a better job of getting your messages across.