All out-of-state travel must now be approved in advance by managing editor Richard Tapscott. There is some snickering that the reason is simple: It cost so much to hire columnists Rob Borsellino and his wife, Rekha Basu (rumored to be getting $80,000 each in salary) and sports columnist Sean Keeler (who, I’m guessing, signed on for considerably less than $80,000) that editors must now find ways to pay them.

January and February are always lean months in the newspaper business. The fat papers of November and December, which are loaded with pre-Christmas ads, suddenly become the skinny papers of the cold, dreary post-New Year’s Day months.

If the profit situation doesn’t improve—and it likely won’t--I’ll make a prediction on what might soon happen with the sports coverage at the morning paper because I saw it first-hand a number of times in my previous writing life.

A mid-afternoon meeting of all members of the sports department will be called to announce that there is a severe budget crunch. It will be announced that there is a cutback in travel. Reporters will not be allowed to travel to certain road games. Specifically, those road games involving Drake and Iowa State will take a major hit.

Drake is always the first team to get screwed by the paper’s "it-costs-too-much-money-to-cover-road-games’’ philosophy. Unless Iowa State gets off to a strong start on the road in the Big 12 Conference, it won’t come as a surprise to me if cost-cutting editors make some heavy-handed decisions about covering the Cyclones’ games.

Northern Iowa is a non-factor. The paper never covers the Panthers away from home unless the games are at Drake, Iowa or Iowa State, or if they’re playing in the Missouri Valley Conference tournament.

Iowa’s road games will continue to be covered because the Hawkeyes are still considered to be threats for the Big Ten title. But if the Hawkeyes should suddenly go on an eight-game losing streak (which is highly unlikely, of course), don’t put it past the editors to raise their eyebrows and say, "Hey, maybe we don’t need to waste money covering them, either.’’

If and when the hammer comes down, coverage of road games involving Iowa State and Drake—especially if it involves air travel, which the bosses don’t want to pay for—will be handled this way: The reporters who have been covering the Cyclones and Bulldogs will be told to, instead of flying to games on the road, come into the office and listen to them on the radio or watch them on television in the newsroom.

The reporter will be expected to write a story based on those radio and TV reports. That includes getting as many quotes as possible from the broadcasts. The Drake and Iowa State sports information directors will be asked to provide as many quotes or notes that they have time to dig up before running to catch the team plane. Then, with a dateline from, say, Terre Haute, Ind., or Boulder, Colo., the paper will carry a story the next morning that is labeled "Special to the Register.’’

As you can see, "Special to the Register’’ isn’t quite as special as some of you might think.

The editors only regard it as "Special to the Register’’ because they don’t have to pay the reporter’s airfare, food and hotel costs. The reporter can simply drive to 8^th and Locust, bring a cheese sandwich into the newsroom for his lunch, put together the best story he can gather off the radio and TV coverage and tell his wife and kids he’ll be home by midnight.

The newsroom bosses will love it. They’ll be congratulating themselves for being ingenious enough to find ways to afford the salaries of the new columnists. Hey, they don’t even have to pay for the cheese sandwich the poor slob who has to cover the game off the radio and TV reports brings from home in a paper sack.