What Happens When Newspapers Gut the Newsroom?

It’s a rhetorical question.

This happens.

This was an “article” written by the PR department at Dalhousie and posted on the Dal website.  The Metro picked it up as a weekend online feature without even re-writing it.

I think we still get scores and game results, but the thing that is seriously missing when newspapers gut staff and pages is features and longer, in depth articles.  It’s sort of annoying when it comes to sports but hard news is in just as bad situation.

For the record, I love noon hoops although I haven’t been out in months (and showed up rarely even when I did go).  I just think it’s absurd for a newspaper to rely on PR departments for content.

Darrell Dexter Wins Majority Government

Not directly NDP related, but Darrell is the only party leader with season tickets to the Rainmen, Eric did a campaign event for the NDP and, according to Frank Magazine, the NDP hired Nancy Sheppard on contract to help out with PR work.

I wouldn’t expect this to have a substantive impact on the operation of the Rainmen.  The MetroCentre is managed by Trade Centre limited which is a provincial corporation, but it’s safe to say that the interim president, Scott Ferguson, was a vice president before that and is likely to stay on as president in the long term.  The one impact that this could have is Darrell and his wife Kelly being too busy to renew their season tickets.  I will try to get a hold of him and ask.

In self indulgent note:  The CBC read a hilarious e-mail that I wrote on the air.  Good times.

Section23 Is One Year Old

366 days ago the Rainmen played their first ever game and blew out the short handed Boston Blizzard.  365 days ago I started this blog.  My first post had zero comments and probably a dozen readers at most, since then I’ve cracked the 30,000 visitor mark.  (oddly enough I actually had visitor 30 000 sometime this morning)  That post demonstrates poor and innaccurate analysis and the first, and only, Dennis Hoffman joke to appear on this blog.

I started the blog because I went out looking for info on teams and players on the internet and found very little.  What I did find was kind of hard to dig up, so I figured I’d pass it along to other people who may be interested so they didn’t have to go digging.  I also wanted to create a place where people could talk about the team – not just talk trash like on OSC, but also to discuss what happens on the court.  Pretty soon I started getting e-mails from people who had info they wanted spread around.  It’s been fun and I am looking forward to another season of rumours, bitter comments, giving advice I am unqualified to give and trying to make information on minor league hoops just a tiny bit easier to find.

Here are some random facts about the first 12 months:

• 210 posts
• 839 comments
• 30, 065 hits
• Most read post.
• Top five most popular searches that people use to get to the blog: Rainmen blog (or some variation of), Eric Crookshank, Kadiri Richard, Lantrice Green, PBL Draft.

Here’s to another year of writing about minor league basketball on the internet instead of doing school work.

CIS Championship Coming Back to Halifax

The AUS were the only group to bid to hold the CIS Championship Tournament, so it looks like it will be back in town in 2011.  This is obviously only good news for basketball fans, and if the Rainmen spin it properly it could be a great chance to cross promote the team.  That said:  it’s still 2 years off so I won’t live here at that point and given the winds of change in minor league basketball, it’s not certain that the Rainmen will be either.

On the downside, this story ties up the local sports media for the next two days (even longer if the CIS does something strange that drags the story out) keeping the Rainmen out of the papers (particularly the Metro with its limited number of stories) at a time when they need to be cranking up the hype machine.  Good thing they didn’t press release anything that was a big deal today.  Good anticipation from Nancy Shepard, the Rainmen’s PR director.

So About the Edmonton Chill…

This talk of Crookshank returning to Halifax got me curious about the Edmonton Chill – the IBL team he was briefly signed to in the spring, but promptly left after promises of accomodations didn’t come through.  At the time the team claimed he didn’t fit in so they released him, Eric said he left when he was told to pay for his own living arrangements.  I assumed he wasn’t lying, some internet naysayers claimed he was.  No one got upset about it.

So I looked for some articles online today instead of doing school work (aka reading about the development of Mothers’ Allowances and social security in Ontario) and found this home run of an article.  I think we can say pretty definitively that the owner was trying to rip Crookshank off.  Unlike a lot of people, Eric left before he could get fleeced.

Gone for Awhile

So I am off to New York to take some summer classes and I will be without a computer for close to a month.  I will try to check in and see what’s happening, but no promises.

Seeing as how this month will likely see the announcement of where the Rainmen will be playing, please post info you come across in the comments section of this post to keep everyone updated.

A Moment of Self Indulgence

Totally not ABA related but I figured I’d throw this out there for comedy’s sake:

Tonight Duncan and I’s rec league team wrapped up our season:  we finished and astounding 1-9.  Our one win came when the other team didn’t show up and we had 6 guys there.  We had a whole bunch of guys bail on us meaning we didn’t play some games due to lack of players, we had constant schedule changes, played most games in the second half of the season with 5 of 6 guys and had our opponents score twice as many points as us in every game but one (which we lost 20-11).  In other words:  we’re ABA bound next year!  Watch out Gwizzlies!  We’re coming for you!