When we told you a couple weeks ago about the St. Louis Cardinals’ upcoming Social Media Night event in conjunction with the Social Media Club of St. Louis, the reaction seemed pretty favorable. Yesterday, however, Matt Sebek, the local sports blogger behind Joe Sports Fan, which is now part of the KFNS network, wrote a column taking issue with how the Cardinals put the event together.
Specifically, he points to the lack of any independent media presence on the panel:
‘The night is backed by a panel of experts that will provide their experiences in social media. Except, every one of their featured media guests is from the institutional sports media.”
(And in case you are not aware, the ‘institutional sports media’ members of the panel are Cardinals beat writers Matthew Leach from MLB.com and Derrick Goold from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, both heavy Twitter users.)
To be clear, Sebek is not saying he has a problem with these guys, just that he wishes some local independent voices had been added to the mix. In his column, he offered up his opinion on several bloggers with local ties that could have been included.
The column has attracted a fair amount of attention at this point, most of it in agreement with Sebek’s thesis. That said, most of the agreement and attention has come from other independent bloggers, many of whom were mentioned in Sebek’s column as people that the Cardinals should have added to the panel.
I have thought this over off and on for almost a day now, (more than I should have, admittedly) and while I think to some extent Sebek has a point, I also think he is making more out of this than there really is.
I think on one hand, if some independent bloggers were added, as Sebek says they should have been, there could be an interesting discussion about the role and position of mainstream media vs. independent journalists and bloggers.
But on the other hand, like it or not, I don’t think the Cardinals were trying to have that discussion. Social media is still a new phenomenon, and no matter what geeks like me tell you, widespread adoption has not happened yet, and corporations are still trying to figure out how to incorporate their message with these new tools. I don’t think the Cardinals were trying to take all that on, I think they were just trying to provide a forum to bring together some of the people that use new media to cover the team with some of the people that are interested in following it.
What are your thoughts?
It makes sense to have some main steam media personalities that have larger name recognition. While I know who Chris Reimer is, and that he is an influential Twitter guy in #STL, he’s still not on most people’s radar. I think this is a good start, but if they still don’t have local bloggers and tweeters in 2 or 3 years then it will be a problem.
Agreed, and thanks for the comment. It is sometimes hard for someone like me to remember that social media is still in it’s relative infancy, and most people out there have not adopted and still really don’t even know what it is.
Greg –
Appreciate you weighing in on this topic and furthering the discussion.
Am I “making too much of this”? Definitely. But, that’s only because I’m passionate about the recent evolution of the local sports media industry, yet disappointed that they narrowly missed making this event extremely effective.
I want to be very clear: I have no doubt that this event will succeed with the selected personnel. They deserve to be there. That said, they represent a very small subset of people that make the local social media industry intriguing and engaging.
Debating issues like “access to the press box”, “do game recaps really matter”, “citing sources” and “gaining and maintaining an audience” would have been much more effective hearing the trials and tribulation from both sides of the media spectrum (namely, mainstream journalists and independent writers/bloggers).
Matt,
Thanks for the comment…(and the fodder)…it’s an interesting discussion and I can see both sides of it. I don’t have all the answers, but it’s a worthy discussion to have.
Hopefully the event will be a huge success and they will do another one.
-Greg
I agree with Matt on this. There are countless Cardinals bloggers (that Matt does a great job of listing on his original post) that deserved to be there in addition to the panel that was named.
Some of the Cardinals bloggers provide much more insight, in-depth conversation and necessary comedy relief (during horrid losing streaks like the one they are in now) than mainstream news outlets. If it wasn’t for bloggers vivaelbirdos and futureredbirds (and several others) I wouldn’t be an informed Cardinals fan.
And as much as I admire and respect the panel that was named, The Cardinals seemed to miss the independent Sports blogger category altogether. This is disappointing since this group serves so many and has been around longer than the mainstream outlets moved to online interactive and social content.
Just my two cents.
To toss my two cents in the ring, it’s also pretty sad to see non-sports folks on the panel. I’m a big fan of Reimer and Tomko personally, but I fail to see what they bring to the event, other than the presence of a SMCSTL board member and his co-worker. McGraw MIllhaven is a radio personality, not a sports guy. Hell, he isn’t even an active user of Social Media — homeboy hasn’t tweeted on his account for almost two months: http://twitter.com/mcgrawmilhaven.
Also, what’s John Mozaliek going to say about social media? “Stop bashing that Ludwick trade!”
There are way more deserving sports executives that could be speaking (Like F-H’s Jim Woodcock, for instance).
The panel just seems … disjointed. It could have been loads better.