Help Wanted

A guy puts a sign in his store window. It says "Help Wanted. Must be able to work with computers, know how to use PhotoShop and be bilingual."

A little while later, a dog walked into the store with the help wanted sign in his mouth. He puts the sign down and starts barking at the store owner, who gets a confused look on his face.

The dog then hops up on the computer table and starts typing away. After a few minutes, he hits the print button, and out comes a document all about dogs, with facts and graphics and everything.

The store owner looks over the paper while the dog barks again.

Then the dog takes out his digital camera, takes the owner's picture, connects the camera to the computer and begins to make all different versions of it in PhotoShop. Again, he prints it out and shows the owner, barking the whole time.

The owner looks at the dog and says "wow, this is great. You can use computers. You know PhotoShop. Tell me, are you bilingual?"

And the dog looks at the store owner and says:

"Meow."

TigerBlog will now give you a few moments to laugh.

Actually, when TigerBlog first heard that joke, the help wanted sign said the store owner was looking for someone who could type and file and was bilingual. TB simply updated it for the modern workplace, which no longer is filled with typewriters and filing cabinets.

Fictitious store owners who serve as straight men to punchline-delivering dogs are not the only ones who are looking for different skill sets these days.

The College Sports Information Directors of America (CoSIDA) have a website (cosida.com) that tracks transactions in the sports information field. The most recent transaction is this one:

Bradley - Julie Kindinger named Coordinator of Creative Production. Previously, Kindinger was the audio/video production coordinator for Global Spectrum at the Ted Constant Convocation Center in Norfolk, Va., since 2007.

Bradley, of course, is the home of former Princeton Executive Associate Athletic Director Michael Cross, who has been the Director of Athletics at Bradley for the last six months.

While at Princeton, Cross was an important proponent of decisions that helped move us away from printed pieces and into the multi-media world. These decisions led to launching the video site (goprincetontigers.tv), as well as TigerCast, the podcasting effort that started last year as well.

TB assumes that Kindinger's position at Bradley, given her background, will be part of an expansion of the multimedia efforts for bradleybraves.com.

Bradley is not the only one who is now hiring people to work in-house whose focus will be video. A week ago, UMass had this for transactions: Hired Sean McCluskey as athletic media relations video production assistant. McCluskey comes to UMass from Plattsburgh State (NY).

Two weeks ago, the Southern Conference had this: Calhoun Hipp III named media relations assistant and Jamie Lillard selected for newly created multimedia services assistant position. A Rhodes College graduate, Hipp spent last season with the NBA's Charlotte Bobcats and also assists the South Carolina media relations office. Lillard is a 2010 graduate of Wofford College.

There are, of course, many more transactions that announce hirings of people to positions like sports information assistant and such, and there is no way to tell how many of those people are being hired with an eye towards multimedia.

As an aside, the word "intern" is disappearing as well; there were four hired this month, while in July 2004, there were 14.

Here at HQ, we used to have a publications person, whose job was strictly to do publications and not to cover sports. That position was shifted to a traditional athletic communications spot after the second publications person (John Cornell) left in 2003, and hirings done since have depended heavily on the applicant's ability to do publications and cover sports.

And now, publications are largely a thing of the past. Today, all the people hired because of their publications skills have been shifted to doing video and audio work, in addition to covering sports. Publications is a tiny, tiny part of it.

Judging by the transactions trends, the world of college athletics is starting to go in the same direction.

Wonder what the July 2015 transactions will look like.