How much time, money and energy could the Commonwealth of Kentucky save if it didn’t send out press releases and media advisories in both plain text and PDF/Word format?

I can understand attaching PDFs or images when supporting documentation is required for the media. But attaching a PDF that says so-and-so will be here-and-there to do this-or-that just to duplicate what’s said in the body of an email? That’s some major waste.

I have received over 1,000 press releases with duplicate PDF documents attached in 2009. And a total of 293 in the past 30 days totaling nearly 150 megabytes of data.

This is occurring at a time when Frankfort should be working to conserve on every front. Data costs money. Electricity gets used (coal gets burned) to create PDFs, to send data, to receive data, to open large files. It’s wholly unnecessary.

Just a peeve. But it’s nearly 2010 and it’s high time we start taking this government conservation thing seriously. Taking simple steps like this saves us tons in the long run.

P.S. Anyone else in “media” noticed a marked uptick in joint press releases and announcements between Steve Beshear and Jerry Abramson since they teamed up for 2011? The least they could do is make the abuse of state resources to tie the two together a little less obvious.