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Suck Bee

Kadeezy

Active member
The Hornets have their best record in decades and are about to take on the number one team in the country and not a peep from the Sac Bee. I don't get what it will take to get the coverage we deserve in the area.

This new one article split policy with UCDungpile is ridiculous too.

I wish Bill Bradley and his minions would do a better job of getting their name out there. I know they have a few different columnists (and they've generally done an okay job this year), but there's so much potential there. A few of those guys need to go to a tailgate (last week would have been perfect), and just handed out fortune cookie sized pieces of paper with the URL. Hand out 1,000 of them! If 50 people come check out the site, that could start things rolling. Hell, even start a kickstarter page or something with a $500 goal to defer some travel costs, etc. I would be in for the promise of coverage at least through basketball season. It can be done!
 
Is anyone really shocked that the Bee is pulling the same thing is has for years?

And I agree with you about SSS. Bradley needs a marketing plan if he ever wants his site taking off; otherwise he is just doing the same thing as before and hoping for a different result.
 
SDHornet said:
Is anyone really shocked that the Bee is pulling the same thing is has for years?

And I agree with you about SSS. Bradley needs a marketing plan if he ever wants his site taking off; otherwise he is just doing the same thing as before and hoping for a different result.

Nope! The bumbling Bee is a rage.

Bill's site has a lot of potential. This may be a situation where Sac State and Bill can't see the forest for the trees.

For example, where is the advertising? Both Sac State Football and Sacstatesports.com do nothing as far as I can tell to promote their interests. I hear ucd is all over the place.
 
Just seeing that the game at EWU this Sat will be picked up by Comcast channel 104 locally. Amd we get it here im the SF Bay Area. Great news to have a Sac State football game on TV that millions will be able to watch.

Go Hornets!!!
 
Screamin_Eagle174 said:
Yeah, I've been looking for game week articles/interviews from Sacramento area papers, and haven't found anything. What's the deal?
Here are the places to find stuff on Hornet athletics:
  • 1. Hornetsports.com – these are the official releases from the AD.
    2. The Hornet Football Facebook page – no articles but they have regularly posted pics and vids as well as some small blurbs about what is going on.
    3. This place – That SDHornet guy provides weekly previews and recaps as well as seasonal outlooks and recaps.
    4. SacStateSports.com – Last season there was something everyday, it has cooled off quite a bit but there is a story or two a week. Good coverage but just not a lot of it. Ironically Bill Bradley (owner of the site) was the sports editor at the Bee for many years and did his fair share of ignoring Hornet athletics while he was there.
    5. For hoops: bigskybball.com – Jon does a great job at trolling all the fan boards and local papers and posts relevant stuff on his site. He also does some predictions and rankings. Good stuff imo.
    6. SacBee – sporadic articles at best. They’ve been ignoring Hornet athletics for years and their main focus is on the Kings closely followed by the Bay Area pro teams.
    7. The State Hornet (statehornet.com) – student newspaper. Don’t expect much here. It was actually decent when I was a student but I troll their sports site from time to time and it’s not that great.
    8. We do have a coaches show on a regional Comcast channel that is usually posted on Facebook. I think they haven’t posted last weeks show yet. It airs every Thursday at 7pm and reruns on Saturday at noon.
Not sure if there is much beyond that but those are the main outlets that come to mind. There might be some other smaller local newspapers that run a story every once in a while but I'm not sure about that.
 
SDHornet said:
4. SacStateSports.com – Last season there was something everyday, it has cooled off quite a bit but there is a story or two a week. Good coverage but just not a lot of it. Ironically Bill Bradley (owner of the site) was the sports editor at the Bee for many years and did his fair share of ignoring Hornet athletics while he was there.

Could it be that Bradley was a closet Hornet fan the whole time, but was responding to orders from higher up (perhaps a UCD fan or someone with an anti-CSUS vendetta) in formulating the daily news feed?
 
Hi guys,

Sorry I haven't been on this board promoting SacStateSports.com more. This thread did get my attention, so I thought I would respond to a few of the thoughts posted here:

* First, I hoped for all hopes that SacStateSports.com would have taken off bigger last season. However, my business partner who was going to do advertising backed off and unique visitors I was hoping for flattened out at about 250 a day. My goal was 500-750.

* I have applied to Kickstarter for funding, but that is only for non-profit endeavors. Sorry, but like most people I want to make a profit.

* It was tough for me to decide to try to do this year's version of the site. I have started two new jobs in recent months. I am running NFLEvolution.com on a part-time basis for the NFL and I recently became Assistant Managing Editor of the SportsXchange.com, the sports wire service arm of Reuters -- both on a consulting basis. So, I have a lot of balls in the air since we all have to earn a living.

* I received a lot of push from my writers to keep the site going, so I did. Unfortunately, it doesn't have the same depth it did last year, including the columns I used to provide and the weekly recruiting updates alone. In fact, I had planned to write another column about North Dakota and how they have quickly become the outcast of the Big Sky, and another about how Weber State was the victim of Arkansas' football mess. Unfortunately, I ran out of time for both.

* I do have short-term plans to hand over the site to the school's digital school and the business management school to see what they would do to the site.

* In the meantime, I am proud to say I have in Bryan Metcalfe one of the best basketball reporters in the Big Sky -- and he's still in school. In fact, he was recently hired as the Bleacher Report's Big Sky reporter because he's that good.

* And, by the way, nobody at the Bee was biased against Sac State or pro UC Davis. I still have very good friends there. But the upper management crunches numbers a lot and the numbers say that Sac State does not draw readers. It's one reason I was unable to debut a Sac State blog when John Schumacher was covering the school -- one of my biggest disappointments.

All that said, I haven't forgotten about the site, I just have put the time into that I would like. However, I am not going to let it die. And I have a few ideas to give it more life down the road.

Thanks for caring, guys. Without your readership, I wouldn't have started SSS in the first place.
Bill Bradley
 
Thanks Bill, those asstard Bee number crunchers should open their eyes. There are over 100,000 Sac State grads and probably 60% or more live in the Bee's regional footprint. I find it hard to believe that these alums don't read the Bee. But they may be like me, disgusted at the paper and its diminished Sac State coverage and liberal down your throat bias.

These number crunchers scratch their heads and wonder why they are going broke, it is because they don't publish what people want/care to read.
 
And they don't publish what people want to read because they make assumptions about what that is and don't bother to do surveys to check up on it.

A prime example is my own local Lodi News-Sentinel. Many Lodians have attended "local" schools (by that I mean the colleges in Stockton and Sac) and are potentially interested in sports at their alma mater, but the paper, claiming a staff shortage, would rather pull a Cal/Stanford article off the wire, when it would take just as much effort to pull a Sac story off the wire, thereby making Hornet fans happy. Of course, the LNS's problems with basic editing (and by that I don't mean editorial opinion but PROOFREADING) make one want to chuck the fishwrap to begin with....
 
Let me clarify one thing about the Sacramento Bee: When I say "number crunchers," I'm not talking about money. Granted, the Bee is in it for a buck like any other newspaper/news site in the country, but they continually look at readership numbers. For instance, they can tell you how many people are reading Sac State articles, at least on the Web. From politics to food to sports, those are the numbers I'm talking about. The reason why there's so much 49ers and Kings coverage? Because web numbers, reader forums and readers polls say that's what people reading. It's the same reason why ESPN does so much with Tim Tebow; because one Tim Tebow article can easily garner incredible page views and higher ratings on SportsCenter.

It's the same manner in which I decided to staff only football and men's basketball this fall -- because those sports get the most readership. All that said, I'm not giving up on SacStateSports.com -- even if I am one of those members of the liberal media ;)

Thanks,
Bill
 
billbradleysac said:
even if I am one of those members of the liberal media ;)

Thanks,
Bill

It is evidenced that professional journalistic objective journalism wasnt taught where you learned the trade. Kiss off Bill. :jack:
 
Pretty hard to get people to suddenly start clicking on Hornet articles when the Bee ignores it for as long as they did. Also pretty hard to get people to randomly come across SSS. Why no tent with free t-shirts or bumper sticker giveaways at tailgates? No better way to get the word out about your site then to pound back some brews and spread the word to the Hornet faithful on game day.

BTW I have enjoyed the Metcalf articles. He does a great job. :thumb:
 

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