Death of game programs?

From The Daily News of Wednesday, Sept. 12, 2007 . . .

The Kelowna Rockets, in an attempt to find ways to make better use of the Internet and their website, have done away with game programs.
Instead of being able to purchase a program at WHL games in Kelowna, Rockets fans will be encouraged to print lineups off the team’s website. Lineups will be available at games, but fans who go the Internet route will find other information, too.
“We just wanted to go with something different,” Bruce Hamilton, the Rockets’ president and general manager, said Tuesday. “If you print a lineup at home, you will find all kinds of little things.”
Those “little things” will include information on that nights planned festivities, as well as coupons for contests scheduled for that particular game, and the evening’s buffet menu for Manhattan Point, the restaurant that is part of Prospera Place.
“It also allows us to get out of the printing business,” Hamilton said. “There isn’t a lot of money in that end of it. And I don’t think it was fair to our customers and our sponsors.”
The Rockets last season averaged 6,102 fans per game. Of those, Hamilton said, only between 700 and 800 fans purchased programs.
Hamilton pointed out that producing the program also was quite labour intensive.
“We produced the guts to our program every game,” he said, adding it meant one person worked on it every game day, starting at 9 a.m. “We just felt there has to be a better way to get people to know who’s playing.
“It’ll be interesting to see how it unfolds.”
If it unfolds the way the Rockets imagine, you can bet other WHL teams will go down the same road in the near future.
In Kamloops, the Blazers will continue their practice of handing out a small program that includes lineups at each home game.
“It’s a freebie for the fans. We sell some advertising in it and that pays for it,” Dean Clark, the Blazers’ general manager and head coach, said. “We don’t make any money off but the advertising allows it to pay for itself.
“We find that people want the lineups. They want statistics. They want information.”