Austin Statesman Engages in Unstatesmanlike Behavior With the Austin Ice Bats
MAJOR BLOGS - www.majorblogs.net - If you look at my previous blog on the Austin Ice Bats situation, you will know that a key component to their being abandoned by the community that they have served for twelve years has been the decision by the local media outlets, most notably the town's biggest newspaper, the Austin Statesman, to abandon the club in its hour of need.
Our friends at the Statesman are gambling that the Ice Bats have gone Sixth Sense, and are already dead, but just don't know it yet. The Bats, as you can read in the prior story, aren't going away, and their fans are not going to take having the team pulled out from under them lying down.
It always causes me to wonder what the sports editor can be thinking when a newspaper runs out on a team that has been an integral part of the community and operated well for so long. Newspapers don't invest their time in fly-by-night operations. The Austin Ice Bats, twelve years later, may fly at night, but they are hardly fly-by-night.
So the Statesman is taking a gamble that the club is indeed dead. If they stay in the market, either to compete with the AHL, or possibly as an elevated AHL franchise of the Stars, it will be very bad for the beat reporter trying to get their credentials into the newest Bat Cave.
For a publication which serves the community, and is ultimately threatened for its own existence by larger forces in major league sports wiping out the need for local newspapers, it might be fitting to stick together and Keep Austin Bats.
Write the editor, and tell them so.
Brian Ross
in Hockey, Sports Business, Sports Journalism
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Reader Comments (3)
I can digg it
And you are correct about the bats' fans. WE ARE loyal and will not transfer that loyalty to the AHL stars or any other interloper/s.
chiro
I forwarded it to them verbatim, but they'll need your approval to reprint it (if they have the guts). Ice Bats fans across America appreciate what you doing here!