NFL and Social Media

brandweek.com – Each April, the National Football League holds the spring Draft, an annual event during which it recruits new players (mainly from colleges) to join its teams. In the past, this selection process was an “institutional event,” where football fans knew the drill and creating buzz around the event was not as necessary. In the age of Twitter, Facebook and mobile technology, however, the NFL is changing up its game. This year, the League is aggressively using social media to promote the two-day Draft, which takes place April 25-26. NFL Online general manager Laura Goldberg spoke with Brandweek about the shift online, how it’s able to better engage fans, and what the NFL is doing differently with this year’s Draft. Excerpts from her conversation are below:

Brandweek: The NFL is leveraging social media—perhaps more so than ever—in its 74th Draft. Why so?
Laura Goldberg: I would call it fan engagement. The fans are incredibly engaged in the Draft and all things NFL. Frankly, they want more and more information. They want to know immediately which [team] is picking which player—whether they are sitting in front of their TV on a Saturday afternoon or taking their kids to the park or need to go to a baseball game, they want to be there. The fans are so passionate about the NFL and about their teams and what’s going on that they want to be able to talk about it. They want to be able to interact with personnel and players and that conversation is happening all around the Web, and a lot of that also happens [outside of] NFL.com, but the idea of engaging with social media is to broaden that conversation.
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MySpace CEO to Step Down

pcworld.com – Chris DeWolfe will hand over his CEO title at MySpace, whose growth has stagnated over the past year while the popularity of rival Facebook booms.

In addition, President Tom Anderson is in discussions to take “a new role” in MySpace, parent company News Corp. announced Wednesday.

News Corp. didn’t announce a replacement for DeWolfe, who will remain on the board of MySpace China and act as a strategic advisor to the company.

The announcements come weeks after News Corp. tapped former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller to lead the unit in charge of its Web properties, including MySpace, as the chairman and CEO of News Corp.’s Digital Media Group, as well the company’s chief digital officer.

MySpace, once by far the largest social-networking site in the world, has seen its popularity cool off, while Facebook’s user base grows at a frenetic pace.

In March 2008, the Fox Interactive Media sites, including MySpace, had 88.3 million U.S. unique visitors, a figure that dropped to 85.1 million last month, according to comScore. In that same time period, Facebook’s U.S. unique visitors grew from 36 million to 61.2 million.

Globally, Facebook sped past MySpace last year. In December, Facebook attracted 108.3 million unique visitors worldwide, while MySpace had 81 million, according to Nielsen Online.
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Wall Street Journal iPhone App Content is Free

Wired – The Wall Street Journal, one of the few newspapers that charges for content online, released an app for the iPhone Wednesday which sets their content free, poking another hole in one of the internet’s oldest pay walls.
The Journal released an free app for the Blackberry last August, a seemingly more natural fit with a corporate demographic. But for business news junkies the iPhone app is a watershed event, putting a financial newspaper of record on what remains essentially a consumer device for free. Even on Amazon’s Kindle the Journal is $9.99 a month — about as much as subscribing to the newspaper itself.
There are plenty of brand-name news app on the iPhone — including Bloomberg, the New York Times, CNN and the AP — so the Journal is a little late to the game. But none of the other big players charge online and, to read most anything on wsj.com, you have to pony up $103 a year — $140 if you want the dead tree version, too. Read the rest of this entry »

Fun at The East Bay Express

For what it’s worth, I miss Stephen. We had daily contact and his drive is contagious.

Metro Pulse – I wish we had the time, energy, and photogenic qualities to do stuff like this:

The East Bay Express in Oakland is one of my favorite alt-weeklies; it’s really well written and they do stuff like run Sarah Palin songwriting contests. A few years ago, editor Stephen Buel managed to actually buy back his paper from former corporate overlord Village Voice Media. (Plus, back when I was living there, he let me write up some winners in their “Best of the East Bay” poll, though I was by no means an expert on local culture.)

The video is great fun, and the answer to the newspaper industry’s woes is not surprising.

Bay Guardian at it Again

SF Weekly – Editor’s note: From the moment SF Weekly published its first issue as a New Times publication in 1995, Bruce Brugmann, Tim Redmond, and their employees at the Bay Guardian made clear their intention to run us out of town. Brugmann famously said that San Francisco would be our Afghanistan. When all else failed, they sued SF Weekly in 2004 for sales below cost. The nearly $16 million verdict is on appeal.

On Good Friday, April 10, Redmond sent us the following announcement making clear his intent to up the ante. We offer you his words in their entirety, and our response. Read the rest of this entry »

Zack de la Rocha Returns to Phoenix

Phoenix New Times – The folks that put thousands in Phoenix’s streets February 28 to protest Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the 287(g) program are ready to do it again May 2, with Rage Against the Machine frontman Zack de la Rocha slated to participate as he did before.

The difference this time is that the anti-Arpaio march will start at the Wells Fargo Building downtown, where the sheriff keeps two pricey floors of executive offices. It will end with stops at Joe’s Estrella and Durango jails.

“It’s to highlight the 287(g) agreement,” explained Phoenix civil rights leader Salvador Reza of the decision to march to Joe’s gulags. “And how 287(g) is being used in the jails. It’s not good in the jails or in the streets. It’s also to highlight all the abuses that are going on in there, like with the broken arm lady, the broken jaw lady, and anyone else who as been abused in there.”

Reza’s referring to the fact that the 287(g) program has deputized 160 of Arpaio’s men to enforce federal immigration law. Arpaio not only uses these men in his anti-immigrant hunting sweeps and in his worksite raids, but also in the jails, where they often coerce and sometimes physically injure undocumented immigrants who are being held pending their transfer to ICE custody.
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