The SCN Encourager – Wednesday, December 12, 2012

The Detroit Tigers – Fox Sports $$$ – & School Communicators

OK. As a school communicator, I’ll admit that I’m not privy to many high-powered negotiations or big buck contractual obligations. (On second thought – with two daughters in college, maybe I am!) But I like sports and we all know that one of the best brands around is The Detroit Tigers. You can imagine how excited I was in August when Kym Reinstadler, our scnforyou.com feature writer wrote about her visit at Comerica Park with Ron Colangelo, the team’s vice-president of communications. (Ron offered a unique perspective and shared what works for him. And you might be interested. The story is now archived in our “prior stories” section.)

So when this November 30 article appeared in The Detroit News about The Tigers mega-dollar deal with Fox Sports – and Ron Colangelo was the Tigers’ media point person discussing the details – I read the article closely. (And no, it wasn’t because I was jealous that Ron and the Tigers did not tap into the vast School Communicators Network empire to break their big news.)

Here is the link to the article by Detroit News sports columnist Lynn Henning. If I had a laser pointer, I’d call your attention to the “More to the picture” header (scroll down a bit) and ask you to read the 4th paragraph. I’m hoping you’ll note a sentence that Lynn wrote about Ron that I found amazing. Impressive, in fact. And I think every communicator, school or not, would be pleased to have a line like this written about them at sometime in their career. It also helped remind me that, yep, character matters. Way to go, Ron.

Can’t find the sentence in the article? Call me. I make house calls.

Tom Page, SCN managing editor