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Blog: Typewriter Ribbons
Created by admin on Tue 18 of Apr, 2006 [23:27 UTC]
Last modified Sat 14 of Aug, 2010 [07:43 UTC]
Description: Forging the finest print
At Last, Possible Winter League Team Names
I've talked about so many other aspects, including the prospect of selling naming rights of the teams to sponsors, if that's what it would take to field a quality team. But now I'll outline some club nicknames as I'd prefer them.
Start-up leagues, in my opinion, try too hard to sound innovative by selecting some jarring names. The XFL was the worst, but hardly the only. I want to go a more vintage route. First there are the names plucked out of baseball's literature. There are the Atlanta Hawks of Michael Shaara's 'For Love of the Game'. There are the New York Mammoths from Mark Harris' The Southpaw and Bang the Drum Slowly. Then there are the New York Knights from Bernard Malamud's The Natural. From the historic Negro Leagues before racial integration, there were two black ballclubs that left their marks, the Homestead Grays most the Negro National League, and the Kansas City Monarchs. The all-black New York Renaissance were thought to be the best pre-NBA basketball team. I like Renaissance. There are defunct names for major league teams. There were the St Louis Browns, the Seattle Pilots, Houston Colt '45s, Washington Senators, and recently the Montreal Expos. These names kind of reek, but I'd like to revive the Expos exactly as they were. Names commonplace to clubs at different levels and in different sports. We know fierce animals are popular, but there's a hazard of sounding too generic. Only the Bruins really stand out as something sounding vintage and not terribly generic. Many failed leagues have had the Mustangs, one of the more appealing choices from a bad lot. The North American Soccer League (NASL) has the New York Cosmos. That's not bad. The NBA had the Washington Bullets, an un-PC name the Brady camp petitioned against until they became the Washington Wizards. From the World League of American Football, I did like the Surge, and from Major League Soccer, I liked the Dallas Burn, which have since taken a Euro name I could puke over. So compiled: Atlanta Hawks New York Mammoths New York Knights (change to Gotham Knights) Renaissance Grays Monarchs Montreal Expos LA Bruins Mustangs Cosmos Bullets Surge Burn A couple original names I lake enough would be the Powers and the Quasars. The Powers, of course, would play at Dell Diamond Stadium in Round Rock, Texas, and be branded as an Austin town. Austin Powers, yeah baby! Austin Powers Quasars And recall I wanted to place a team in Puerto Rico and as many as three in Mexico. Their names would probably need to be in Spanish.
Some Advice To Major Sports Leagues From The American Enterprise Institute
Policy think tanks have traditionally focused their efforts on government policy and politics, publishing to pursued either policy-makers directly, or voters.
But The American, the publication of the American Enterprise Institute, does publish essays on public square issues that are aimed at an audience other than political junkies. In 2008, Mark Strong wrote a piece urging FIFA, the international governing body of soccer, to just chill when it comes to foreigners owning soccer clubs  :" There’s no question that Manchester City supporters may have been irked by Thaksin’s erratic behavior. But EPL fans are used to watching world-class players, and it’s doubtful that many fans want to block foreign billionaires from investing in their favorite clubs. Blatter may be “alarmed” by the massive injections of foreign cash into EPL sides, but fans want their teams to attract top talent. Bringing Brazilian star Robinho to Manchester City from Real Madrid cost nearly $50 million; bringing Ivorian star Didier Drogba to Chelsea from Marseille cost more than $36 million. It is exceedingly unlikely that either purchase could have been completed without the foreign capital provided by Manchester City owner Sulaiman al-Fahim, an Emirati, and Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich, a Russian. "Indeed, the recent surge of foreign capital into English soccer has turned the EPL into the most prestigious league in the world. Seven out of the 20 EPL teams now have non-English owners. Four of the ten most expensive transfers in soccer history have brought world-class players (such as Michael Ballack of Germany and Fernando Torres of Spain) to EPL clubs. The EPL is among the world’s richest sporting leagues; it is also the most watched. During the 2007-08 season, EPL teams brought in roughly $3 billion in revenue and inked $4 billion worth of media deals. As the league has acquired more foreign capital, it has also acquired more talented players and more TV viewers and generated more revenue, just as we would expect. As I've plotted a major winter baseball league, I considered it a major part of the dream to entice the foreign consortium, prince, or sovereign wealth fund to get in on owning some clubs. When you're an underdog, you have to leverage some sort of comparative advantage, and with professional baseball, there's taking advantage of the blue blood attitude Major League Baseball takes in accepting members of ownership groups. Also from The American, Will Wilson wrote in 2007 about the closed gardens of major leagues :" Haven’t heard of NFL Network? The league launched it back in 2003. Until this season, its programming consisted of NFL Films highlights, analysis and discussion shows, news and updates, and preseason games. All of which makes it a nice channel to have—if you really, really like professional football. Most people, however, have a merely passing interest in football, if any. The vast majority of fans are casual: about 130 million people watch the Super Bowl, but only about 20 million watch the average nationally televised regular season game. Several cable companies, including TimeWarner? and Cablevision, do not carry NFL Network as part of their basic cable packages, offering it instead as part of their premium sports packages. "The NFL Network wanted to be part of the lucrative basic lineups, which have more viewers and more revenue than any of the special packages. In order to hold cable carriers’ feet to the fire, the league took advantage of its power to reschedule the actual games (not just the television), slating live games to take place on Thursday nights in late November and December so that other sports wouldn’t provide substitutes for fans without NFL Network on their cable package. That aggressive scheduling move triggered an online public relations fit. TimeWarner? opened a website called NFLgetREAL, the NFL responded with iwantNFLNetwork, and an unaffiliated party established timewarnergetreal. With negotiation savvy like this, it’s little wonder that no deal was reached. The scheduling also effectively spoiled my office pool. Wilson missed the bigger problem with the NFL Network's closing out of casual fans. Televised sports wants to be free. Consumers aren't actually heavily invested in following football games, as he points out, but it isn't the burden of watching on Thursday that's the problem, it's the burden of subscribing. Today, we're seeing the big leagues slowly vanish from the television set, and the top college athletic conferences are beginning to join them. It is my contention that they will all vanish from our culture if this trend continues, and they're needlessly giving away the broadcast networks as niches. Already, the NFL has a lurking competitor taking it's place on basic cable. The UFL, a professional football league whose inaugural season was last year, has broadcast agreements with three cable outlets, Versus, HDnet, and the New England Sports Network (NESN), a regional outlet that will air Hartford Colonials games. In addition, the UFL is signing deals with local radio networks. But broadcast of games is only part of the story with the closed gardens of the major leagues. As my post about MLN closing down, the major leagues have shunted the press out in lots of cases, and have built their own "news" outlets. Thought they don't appreciate it, the NFL and others could lose the press to their growing rival, if the UFL opens itself to the press more. And believe me, it could be easy enough for them to do, starting with post-practice interviews, something the NFL has cracked down on in recent years.
The Wall Street Journal Covers Hollywood's Foreign Market Emphasis
I've talked about it on this site, then talked about a similar shift in the miniseries, where the emphasis is more on finding foreign production partners, than foreign audiences.
Now, The Journal is covering what you read here first: " The rising clout of international audiences is a sea change for Hollywood. Decades ago, a movie's foreign box office barely registered with studio executives. Now, foreign ticket sales represent nearly 68% of the roughly $32 billion global film market, up from roughly 58% a decade ago, according to Screen Digest Cinema Intelligence Service. The result is that one of the most American of products is now being retooled to suit foreign tastes. Studios have begun to cast foreign actors in American-themed blockbusters like "G.I. Joe." Scripts are being rewritten to lure global audiences. And studios are cutting back on standard Hollywood fare like romantic comedies because foreign movie-goers often don't find American jokes all that funny. Several Hollywood studios have gone as far as financing, producing and marketing original movies for markets like South Korea and Brazil. So, as Hollywood has gone international, America is in the curious position of not truly having a domestic movie industry anymore. Bill Whittle, co-founder of Declaration Entertainment *, must have noticed the trend as early as I did, as his production company is developing for the purpose of filling that domestic void.Whittle, a staunch conservative and retired Air Force pilot, believes the lack of a true domestic film industry that targets Americans as their audience is hurting the culture. His solution, which may only be a forlorn hope, is a subscription-based "citizen producer" model, which solicits volunteers to pay$10 a month. Bill has said this model will spare Declaration Entertainment from taking loans, and possibly having to make desperate decisions in order to pay off those loans. Sound a little too quixotic? Well, Whittle's enterprise certainly won't be the only production company that will aim at the domestic market. As I've said before, if America is a niche market, it's one you could drive a truck through. And a simple act of congress could change the situation. I don't mean subsidies or tariffs or any sort of protectionism. It would simply take congress overturning the result of United States v. Paramount Studios, Inc. This Supreme Court decision from 1948 interpreted the Sherman Anti-Trust? Act to mean that film studios couldn't own movie theaters. If congress passed, well, we'll call it the Studio Restoration Act, and allowed studio and theater to reintegrate, we would arguably see the domestic market overtake the foreign market again. The Paramount case also banned block booking, the practice of bundling multiple films together to sell, as a bloc, to independent theaters, who would then be obligated to show each film in the bundle. The ban on block booking pretty much destroyed the B-film altogether, and wrecked the production value of A-films. Now, congress surely wouldn't want to wipe out "independent" films, so I imagine there would be some limit on how many theaters a studio could own, just like how there's a limit to how many broadcast stations a network can own. And surely a reasonable limit can be found on how much bundling can be done in block booking, just as there's a limit on how much programing a network can put on it's broadcast affiliates. But the congress that ostensibly represents Americans must agree that our studios should not continue to be so watered down that they cannot produce high-quality films to the preference of their fellow Americans. By urging congress to allow for the limited return of vertical integration in film, the studios could grow into the giants that could make American cinema great again. If I'm wrong, comments are open.
"Son of TARP"
The Wall Street Journal has a worthwhile editorial on the bizarre previsions within the Small Business Jobs Act
:" The bill authorizes Treasury to purchase up to $30 billion of stock in small, community banks across the country. The banks in turn would agree to issue as much as $300 billion in loans to small businesses that they wouldn't otherwise lend to. You can bet that many businesses that get the loans will be engaged in not very profitable, but politically correct activities, such as diversity investing and renewable energy. Sound at all like subprime mortgage loans? "Here's the best part: The whiz kids at the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation estimate that this program will raise $1.1 billion for the federal government. So there really is a free lunch. How odd. The government buying up "troubled assets" in 2008 was supposed to be an emergency measure, but I guess what they say about government setting precedents really is true. If it's been done before, it's easier to get away with doing it again.
Research On Concessions Revenue In Ballparks
I hadn't been about to find data on revenue generated by the concessions stands in the major sports stadiums until yesterday, when I read this ESPN article on the safety of stadium food
:" Serving food to the masses also means big money to the providers, teams and stadium owners; as such, the industry is highly competitive. Starting in August, Rojo Hospitality — an offshoot of the Arizona Cardinals organization — will begin providing concessions under a two-year, $26 million contract at University of Phoenix Stadium after a competitive bidding process in which it beat out national contenders Aramark and Centerplate. All three companies promised about $5.8 million in profit back to the Arizona Cardinals, Fiesta Bowl and the Arizona Sports & Tourism Authority combined, out of $13 million in annual sales. "The football stadium holding just over 60.000 people, Cardinals playing eight home games, and Fiesta Bowl being one game, this can help us get a metric of what the major winter baseball league would bring in. Remember my goals, a minimum of 10,000 in the stands a game for fifty home games. 10,000 times 50 = 500,000 people showing up to the winter league home games a season. 60,000 times nine = 540,000 showing up to the University of Phoenix Stadium a year. That's roughly equal, I think. So we can say, without polishing a precise estimate, if the winter league teams had a similar contracting agreement, that a little less than $5.8 million dollars would come to each team. Not, these back-napkin estimates aren't precise enough to plan a business around, but they do help conceptualize the league actually working. Five million dollars is more than the team salary cap in the Canadian Football League, so arguably revenue from food and drinks alone could cover the payroll for a roster of athletes equal or higher than the CFL (and a baseball team has a far smaller roster than a football team). Combining concessions with seats, merchandise, television, radio, and web properties (and maybe parking), you can start to see why I think it's possible at that 10,000 person threshold. The trick is prudently building a presence in the right cities. Just 10,000 sports fans willing to watch something other than football, basketball, and hockey in the winter.
Problogger On Selling Via One's Blog
He's asking his readers to brainstorm
. I consider it vital that anyone considering "monetizing" to set some rules that will prevent them from being labelled a splog (spam blog). I'd bet a lot of well-meaning "mommy bloggers" and so on end up being flagged, delisted, and just ignored for too aggressively pushing products.Perhaps folks should consider as an exercise writing a creed that commit one's self to what the core of blogging is: providing free written content to readers. How about thinking of blogging as writing a letter? If you're writing a letter, the body of the letter is where the 'meat' is. At the bottom is the closing, with your signature. That signature could be a standard reminder that you're selling a book. I suggest, if you're tech-able, to have a script add that signature at the foot of each post. You don't have to commit yourself every post to write that "body" as content completely unrelated to selling your own merchandise, but you would be greatly helping yourself hold an audience if you wrote a proper message to your readers daily. Independentbaseball.net's blog is a good example of just how big the "signature" at the foot of each post can get. I don't know how many readers they get, but it seems like something regulars can get used to seeing without being turned off. It is a big signature, bigger than the body of most posts. But at least readers can accustom themselves to finding the message that really interests them.As for what one can sell via blogging, it should be obvious that the "core app" all bloggers share is that they think they can write, they think they can provide content people want to see. Most are wrong, of course, but let's play free-association games and compile what writing can sell.
If you've done any good networking your blog with peers in your little field of study, you should have a relationship with these people. If your tiny network of interest covers, say, a small subculture or school-of-thought, you have all the "human capital" for a trade magazine, both electronic and physical. Yep, publish-on-demand is for magazines, too. You almost certainly can't do a monthly, but go ahead and broach the subject of a quarterly.
If your primary product for sale is your own written word, or at least your words and pictures are the most prominently-displayed items, I think you'll avoid the hazard of being dismissed as a splogger. If you're prolific enough, you can build a career around giving something away daily, and offering a giveaway of more premium stuff.
Federal Judge: "Cheerleading Isn't A Sport!"
More aggressive enforcement of Title IX that could hurt the college sports industry
:" Competitive cheerleading is not an official sport colleges can use to meet gender-equity requirements, a federal judge ruled Wednesday in ordering a Connecticut school to keep its women's volleyball team. "Volleyball players and their coach sued Quinnipiac University after it announced in March 2009 that it would eliminate the team for budgetary reasons and replace it with a competitive cheer squad. This is frustrating. Title IX dictates gender equality in that if colleges offer a sport for men, they must also offer one for women. The problem for colleges is that in the real world, operating an athletic program to the specs of Title IX takes money. Only men's football and basketball draw the spectators to be profitable, and I recall George Will citing a stat that even 40% of the NCAA football programs lose cash. Not a lot of colleges today offer soccer for the reason that both genders would form squads, and, Major League Soccer barely breaking even, many doubt a male squad would do well enough to support the female squad. Competitive Cheer was supposed to help get around the economic reality that spectators just aren't watching females play, and as the feminists are cheering (heh) the collapse of this "dodge", they're really celebrating the imminent closing of athletic programs for both genders. But hey, at least we'll all then be equally miserable, right?
MajorBlogs: The NBA D-League Looks Stable
Major Blogs went under with their parent operation, the MLN newswire (which tracked minor league events), but before they closed, they gave their opinion that NBA-Development has gotten over it's early troubles.
Quote :" The NBA D-League? is arriving at a point, after a decade, where it is an "overnight success." The operation is generating both quality players to fill benches in the NBA and a growing fan base who come out to see guys vying for that shot at the NBA. The league gets good television time on NBA-2 and occasionally on ESPN-2. Placement of their showcase events around NBA events was also a very savvy marketing idea. Next year, when the team in Frisco, Texas comes on line with coach Nancy Lieberman on board, another bit of history gets made, as the D-League? breaks the gender line in coaching for the first time in any NBA operation. What is probably less known by fans and anyone outside of the NBA community is how valuable the D-League? has been in developing front-office talent with great diversity and passion. It has also been a great tool for the NBA to penetrate the marketing of their product into towns outside of the traditional major league markets which improves television market coverage and expands fan base into what were largely college-only or even non-basketball towns. In my opinion, the NCAA's imminent expansion of the "March Madness" tournament will further devalue college basketball's 35-game regular season, to the benefit of the D-league. I think college hoops will regret de-emphasizing the regular season and ceding months of traditional basketball season to a minor league outfit.
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