A Baseball Fan Memoir Chapter 5 – Money Changes Everything

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Ken Dowell

Between 1991 and 2014 the cost of bringing a family of four to the ballpark for a major league baseball game increased 168%. That is based on a statistic called the Fan Cost Index which includes four average price tickets, two beers, four soft drinks, four hot dogs, parking, two game programs and two of the least expensive caps. In 1991 that amounted to an average of $79. In 2014 it was $212.

The average salary of a major leaguer during that time period increased 270% from $891,000 to $3.3 million. At the same time the inflation adjusted median U.S. household income increased 28% from $40,800 to $51,900.

That’s going to change baseball and it’s going to change the experience of attending baseball games. Just as income inequality has ballooned in America, income inequality among major league baseball teams has likewise expanded. In Boston, the most expensive place to attend a baseball game, the fan price index went up 290% to $350. By comparison, in Pittsburgh the increase was 120% to $161.

Fortunately for baseball fans, the disparity in wealth has not completely been reflected in team results. Of the five teams with the highest payrolls in 2014, only two, the Dodgers and the Tigers, made the postseason playoffs. The Yankees, Red Sox and Phillies all failed to quality with the latter two finishing dead last in their division. Two of the teams that did qualify, the A’s and the Pirates, were 25th and 27th, respectively, in the payroll standings.

However, the wealth disparity has clearly impacted the movement of players. The wealthier teams dominate the free agent market which in turn gives them the ability to attract more fans and command higher local TV fees and ad rates. This leads to a lot of player movement, the result of which is that in many smaller markets the fans routinely see the best players leave as soon as they mature. Some teams actively trade their best players before their contract expires because they know they won’t be able to compete in the free agent market. The Tampa Bay Rays this year traded their popular ace pitcher David Price for that reason.

One of the most glaring examples of how money changed baseball occurred in 1998 in Florida. After winning the World Series in 1997, the Florida Marlins owner Wayne Huizenga sold off most of the players who were responsible for winning that title. In 1998, the Marlins finished with the worst record in baseball. The owner sold the team and landed on his feet. The players landed on their feet. It’s only the fans that took it on the chin. (Huizenga was the CEO of Blockbuster and we all know how that worked out.)

Another example is the opening of the new Yankee Stadium in 2009. The Yankees opened the season with their usual star-studded cast. Their attendance was among the best in the league, but if you watched a game from the new stadium on TV, it looked half empty. That’s because no one was sitting in the prime seats behind home plate. The Yankees had the audacity to charge $2,500 a seat (that’s for one game not the season). Even in New York, very few people were stupid enough to pay that. Within two weeks of the season opener, the Yankees were slashing some of their ticket prices in half.

The stadiums where the costs were highest were now experiencing the Madison Square Garden syndrome. All the real fans were in the upper deck.

In baseball’s high rent districts (and I live in the New York area) the days when individual fans purchase season tickets year after year and sit with other fans who have been their longtime ballpark neighbors are gone. The so-called premium seats are for the most part filled with folks who were given those tickets because of a business relationship. The lower level is for expense accounts not family budgets.

Many of these “fans” arrive fashionably in the third inning or so and head out by the sixth. They may be more interested in being seen than seeing the game.  Not the people I want to sit with when I go to a game.

The decades of the 90’s and “ought’s” were probably the time in my life when I was best able to afford the inflated cost of MLB. I certainly forked over silly sums of money for some other stuff during those years. But the idea of spending hundreds of dollars to go to a baseball game just rubbed me the wrong way. I also was less then enamored with watching millionaire players who signed long term contracts and responded with increasingly diminished performance. (This was fairly typical of my hometown Mets until the owners decided to invest in a Ponzi scheme instead of ballplayers.)

But that hardly meant I was done going to baseball games. While the majors were awash in high finance, the minor leagues were having a renaissance in the New York/New Jersey area.

The period from 1961 to 1994 was the dark ages for New York/New Jersey minor league baseball. There was one short-lived venture in 1977-78 in Jersey City. The Jersey City Indians, a poor team affiliated with a major league franchise that had little following in this area and playing in a dilapidated stadium that was soon to be torn down, lasted two years. I made a couple of those games and was sorry to see them go.

Arm & Hamer Park, Trenton

Arm & Hammer Park, Trenton, home of the Thunder, opened in 1994 as Waterfront Park.

Things changed in 1994. In that year the Trenton Thunder began playing in the brand new Waterfront Stadium as a AA affiliate of the Detroit Tigers, and the New Jersey Cardinals, a single A St. Louis affiliate, opened play at Skylands Park in Sussex County. Both played to full houses. The Cardinals have since moved on, but the Thunder are still going strong and are one of the best organizations in baseball.

Independent league ball moved in four years later with teams in Atlantic City, Little Falls, Bridgewater and Newark. Camden came onboard in 2001 and a single-A Phillies affiliate was born that year in Lakewood. Also during this time the Yankees and Mets finally decided to stop blocking minor league baseball in their territory and the Staten Island Yankees and Brooklyn Cyclones were born.

That’s ten teams created in an 8-year period. Newark and Atlantic City have fallen by the wayside but most of the others are pretty successful.

While it would cost $337 to take a family of four to a New York Yankees game, for a few bucks more ($350) I could buy a season’s ticket for the New Jersey Jackals. And the Jackals will toss in the playoff tickets for free. Who knows what the Yankees would charge now for playoff tickets if they made it. The  Jackals have a once a week dollar beer night, a dollar dog night, an all you can eat night and even a weekly game when I can bring my dog. That’s pretty typical of minor league promotions.

Robinson Cano began his professional career as a Staten Island Yankee

Robinson Cano began his professional career as a Staten Island Yankee

Sometimes you get an early glimpse of players who are destined for stardom.  Watching the New Jersey Cardinals I saw the parent club’s number one draft choices Matt Morris and Adam Kennedy with their first professional team. Neither lasted too long in Sussex County before moving up the chain. I watched Robinson Cano as a Staten Island Yankee and Melky Cabrera in the Trenton Thunder outfield.

The majority of players in Class A and AA ball aren’t going to the majors. What you are seeing is guys chasing a dream. In independent ball, the chances are even more remote. These guys aren’t ready to give up because they love the game. A stark contrast from the over-the-hill millionaire playing out a long-term contract.

No one’s getting rich and fat in the minors. And no one’s blowing a paycheck to watch them. I like it like that.

In next week’s post I’ll offer some retirement advice for baseball fans.

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On a Street Once Lined with Striking Silk Workers

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Ken Dowell

On a quiet residential street in Haledon, N.J., one house stands out from its neighbors. It is taller, more stately, and much older. And it is a national landmark because of its role in the history of the American labor movement.

Botto HouseThe Botto House was the rallying point for the 1913 Paterson silk strikers. Forbidden to assemble by Paterson authorities, they were welcomed to Haledon by its sympathetic socialist mayor William Brueckmann. The Bottos, an Italian immigrant family of textile workers, offered their home as a place where strikers could assemble safely and where strike organizers and sympathizers could meet.

Among the people who spoke from the balcony of Botto House were International Workers of the World founder Big Bill Haywood; Irish immigrant Patrick Quinlan, who was one of the organizers of the strike; Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who later became a founding member of the ACLU; and muckraker author Upton Sinclair (“The Jungle”). As many as 20,000 striking silk workers attended the Sunday rallies in front of the Botto House.

1913 Paterson Silk StrikeThe 1913 strike included about 24,000 workers. It was a general strike, including women and men, skilled and unskilled, immigrants and English-speakers. The goal of the strikers was an 8-hour day. Pietro Botto, who owned the Haledon house, was himself a mill worker who worked 10-12 hours a day, 5-1/2 days a week.

Eventually the manufacturers outlasted the strikers and they went back to work. Some of the textile shops offered concessions, including reducing the work day from 10 hours to 9.

1913 Paterson Silk StrikePietro and Marie Botto and their daughter migrated from Biella, Italy, in 1892. They were part of a larger movement of weavers as what had been a cottage industry was consumed by industrial production. The Bottos first settled in West Hoboken (now Union City). After 15 years of working in silk mills and adding three more daughters, the family was able to purchase the house in Haledon which was known as a “streetcar suburb” of Paterson.

The 12-room Botto house was built in 1908. It was also used by the Bottos as a Sunday retreat for workers, offering a bocce court, card tables and food prepared by Marie and her daughters. The home has been restored to what it looked like as the early 20th century home of Italian immigrants.

Botto House kitchenBotto House

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Botto House is now the site of the American Labor Museum. In addition to its exhibit about the 1913 strike it also has temporary exhibits. True to its roots the focus of these exhibits is immigration and labor.

American Labor Museum

American labor Museum

American labor Museum

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A Baseball Fan Memoir Chapter 4 – New Places, New Faces

Posted on September 30, 2014 by Ken Dowell

I spent the 50’s in New York’s iconic and since demolished ballparks. The 60’s were all about Shea. And I started the 70’s drinking beer with my buddies at the “Mistake by the Lake.”

In the 80’s and 90’s, largely due to the nature of my job, I traveled a lot to cities in the U.S. These were cities where my employer had offices and more often than not they were major league cities. I visited stadiums n Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington. I went to Atlanta and Pittsburgh and saw baseball in Chicago, Minneapolis, Houston and Denver.

Along the way I added a couple more “favorite teams.” One played in the best ballpark in baseball. The other in arguably the worst.

I went to Memorial Stadium in Baltimore a couple times. For me it was memorable mostly for the bumper-to-bumper parking lots. I was fascinated by the fact that you seemed to be able to get out of the bumper-to-bumper lots in Baltimore faster than the more modern sort of lots where you park between the lines and drive in aisles. Of course if you wanted to leave in say the sixth inning, you were screwed.

If you think of the things that changed baseball in the last few decades what first comes to mind might be money or steroids or TV. But in terms of positive impact on fan experience, nothing was more important than the opening in 1992 of Oriole Park at Camden Yards.

Think of the state of baseball stadiums at that time. They were mostly giant oval concrete structures. ”All purpose” stadiums, very utilitarian and utterly characterless. Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia, Three Rivers in Pittsburgh, Riverfront in Cincinnati. The sheer size of these structures (some had seating capacities in excess of 60,000) combined with the oval shape that didn’t correspond to the baseball diamond, assured that there was not a good seat in the house.

Also, following the urban flight and blight of the late 60’s and 70’s, many stadiums began to be built outside the city, in suburbs, maybe even atop landfills. There was nothing around. No strip of sports bars, no outside restaurants. There was the stadium and there was the parking lot. For some of these venues, the closest place to get food outside the stadium was a gas station convenience store.

So you had to eat in the stadium. And that was another story. Matching the institutional design of the all-purpose stadium was the institutional food service which at best served a quality of food that might match a high school cafeteria in a downscale neighborhood. Did people eat hot dogs at baseball games because they loved hot dogs? Or was it because the other options were a box of Crackerjacks or a cold, stale pretzel.

Built to be part of the city of Baltimore, not to run away from it, Oriole Park features an open outfield looking out onto the warehouse that made it look like Baltimore. Located downtown near the Inner Harbor with new light rail train service it brought people into the city. The iron and brick design was intended to be retro but it proved to be futuristic. Camden Yards set the standard for the next 20 years of stadium design with new stadiums in Philadelphia, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, New York (Citi Field) and many others built with similar designs.

 

camden yardsAnd when you walked onto the ground one of the first things you see is Boog’s Barbeque.  No longer will baseball fans have to eat ARA Services’ boiled hot dogs. Boog’s is independently owned, has great food and it’s all Baltimore because it has Boog’s name on it. (Boog Powell is a former Oriole great and fan favorite.) There’s a restaurant in the warehouse and concessions run by other local eateries. In the same way that Camden Yards changed the thinking about how to build a ballpark the Orioles changed the way MLB teams went about feeding their fans.

The stadium is more than 20 years old now but it is still a thrill to go there and as the Orioles head into the post season I look forward to seeing the atmosphere at Oriole Park, even if only on TV.

While I became an Orioles fan because of their stadium, I became a Twins fan in spite of it. I’ve attended several Twins games in Minneapolis and most of them were at the Metrodome. I’ve always felt the idea of indoor baseball was a little strange but even among indoor stadiums, the Metrodome had to be the worst. It was truly like playing in a giant inflatable plastic bag.

But what made the fan experience in Minneapolis were the fans themselves. Where were the 30-something blowhards standing, beer in hand, and bellowing out crude wisecracks that only their drunken buddies thought were funny? Why wasn’t anyone heckling the other team? Why wasn’t anyone booing every mistake or shortcoming by the home side? No one seemed to be moving their family to other seats because of the obscene language of their neighbors.

Twins logoI wasn’t in New York anymore. Nor Philly or Boston for that matter. It was the proverbial family atmosphere that was supposed to be part of the lure of baseball. I know friends have told me they’ve found the same thing in Cincinnati and in Kansas City and in other cities but it was in Minneapolis that I experienced it. The fans were friendly and polite, but also knew all the players, were completely attentive to the game and were unfailingly supportive of their Twins.

I remember one game in particular that I attended in the Metrodome as possibly the best baseball game I’ve ever seen. Johan Santana of the Twins and Curt Schilling of the Red Sox hooked up in the pitchers dual in which each went the full nine giving up only a single solo home run. The Sox ended up taking the lead in the 10th, but a Jason Kubel grand slam in the bottom of that inning won it for the Twins.

The Twins and the Orioles have had their moments in the sun but neither has won a World Series for a long time and neither routinely sports a roster with marquee names. But that isn’t what I’m interested in. It’s more the atmosphere at the ballpark, the facility itself and the fans, that would keep me coming to the games.

In next week’s post I’ll consider the influence of money on the game and how I became disillusioned with the major leagues.

See also, A Baseball Fan Memoir Chapter 3 – On the Banks of the Cuyahoga.

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A Baseball Fan Memoir Chapter 3 – On the Banks of the Cuyahoga

Posted on September 26, 2014 by Ken Dowell

As the decade of the 70’s began, I was a college student in Northeast Ohio. I had some time on my hands, a friend or two with cars, and an on-campus job that yielded a couple of dollars. That was the perfect scenario for becoming a Cleveland Indians fan.

The Indians played in Cleveland Municipal Stadium, a New Deal era structure which also went by the name of “Mistake by the Lake.” It was old, massive, dirty and windy.

The early 70’s era Tribe squads were about as appealing as their ballpark.  Between 1969 and 1972, the four years when I was in Ohio, the Indians finished last twice and next-to-last twice. I tried to think of who the best players were at the time, but I couldn’t think of any. I looked online to jog my memory and it did just that. Ray Fosse was the Indians catcher. He was an excellent player but was beset by injuries including a broken shoulder from a violent collision at home plate with Pete Rose in the 1970 all-star game.

I stole the title for this chapter from the movie Major League in which Bob Uecker uttered the phrase “on the banks of the Cuyahoga” in setting the stage for another Indians game. The Cuyahoga is the river that famously caught fire in 1969. So aside from the deteriorating stadium and crappy team, the Indians played alongside a river that stunk and looked putrid.

cleveland indianAnd yet what I learned in college was to love the Indians. While I considered myself a politically conscious and progressive college student I somehow managed to overlook the name of the team, the logo which featured a caricature of an Indian with a shit-eating grin on his face and the fact that there were usually some shirtless folks at the game banging drums and wearing dime store headdresses.

Going back to the idea that we had more time than money, we tried to maximize both by going to doubleheaders. Here’s what I remember about those glorious and long Sundays watching the Indians at Municipal Stadium.

First of all these games didn’t fill the stadium, nor were there a lot of people heading into downtown Cleveland for a Sunday stroll at the time. So we ignored the parking lots and easily found spots on the street. This was free…almost. After you parked your car you were likely to be approached by a young fellow who would offer to guard it for you for $5. We were up for that. Not much of a parking fee and my friend’s car was always there when the game was over.

It seems as though every one of these doubleheaders were against Detroit. And my memory is that the Tribe usually got ambushed in the first game and scalped in the second. I checked baseball-reference.com and it turns out that the Indians really didn’t play Detroit every weekend. But I did find a Sunday in June of 1970 in which the Tigers won the first game 7-2 and the second game 9-8 and the whole event took more than 7 hours. That sounds fairly typical of my experience going to Indians games.

As you can imagine, college students sitting in the hot sun for that length of time tended to put away some beer. In fact we would consume quite a bit of beer, so much that I remember having to change our seats because there were so many discarded beer cups there was no room for our feet. That of course was not a problem because as you slowly waded into the back end of the second game there were seats aplenty.

What was a problem was that if you were going to drink that much beer, you were going to have to pee, and just about every other guy who was still at the stadium had the same problem so there was a good sized line for the men’s room. The toilet facilities in a stadium as old as the Cleveland Muni were not what you would expect to find in a 21st century ballpark. So while I was not totally surprised to see a group urinal type of arrangement I was bewildered to see that the urinals here were like bathtubs and guys lined up around the tub trying to avoid eye contact while they peed. At the tail end of one of these games, my friend Jay and I stood in line for a good 20 minutes, bouncing up and down trying to hold it, and then when we got to this cluster flush, neither of us could make ourselves go.

I haven’t been to a game in Cleveland for many years although I very much hope to get there in near future. I have never quite been able to bring myself to wear a cap or shirt with a stupid-looking Lone Ranger era grinning “Indian” on it. But I will always be a Cleveland fan.

(In next week’s post I wander off into the midwest and find new teams to root for.)

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(Nearly) Live at Social Media Week – The Future of Publishing

Posted on September 24, 2014 by Ken Dowell

Content will be created for mobile. Distribution will be through social networks. Monetization will come from native advertising. Is that the future of publishing? Or is that already the state of the state for media properties?

Mobile, social and native were the key discussion points at today’s Future of Publishing session at Social Media Week Sydney. The panel included representatives from Buzzfeed, Vice and two Australian media properties, Sound Alliance and Mamamia.

The conventional wisdom about content for mobile is that it must be shorter and simpler because it is harder to keep your reader engaged.  Buzzfeed’s Simon Crerar pointed out that when you make video for mobile you use one or two people and you crop tightly.  But not everyone agreed. Alex Light of VICE said “mobile hasn’t changed the way we are creating content.” He also noted that while many consumers are accessing content on mobile they are using their phones as second screens and casting or slinging the content onto larger screens.

If the content is good enough most of the panelists felt longform can still work with a mobile audience. Neil Ackland of Sound Alliance claimed their data shows that the mobile audience is not dropping off sooner than other audiences.

All of the panelists represented media properties that are heavily dependent already on social distribution. Crerar said.”Buzzfeed wouldn’t exist without social media.” And Light added that social media has “allowed us go into video and compete with networks and to get a global audience.” And that at a cost that is minimal compared to owning a TV network.

Facebook and Pinterest were the most frequently cited traffic drivers for these publishers. There are some differences based on demographics. Jamila Rizvi said Mamamia targets an audience of women in the 25-50 demographic and so for them Facebook and Pinterest are what works. But Light noted, “The younger part of our audience is moving beyond Facebook and beyond Twitter. We want to be in the next place they go.”

The combination of using a mobile device and accessing content via social networks means, in Rivzi’s words, “the audience is just coming into articles and leaving.” So for publishers there is less emphasis on the home page and more on how you display on social properties.

Everyone on the panel is using at least some native advertising. Ackland said, “Native advertising is the future of where we see out business going.” He expects that the time isn’t very far away when native becomes the majority driver of Sound Alliance’s revenue.

The ideal situation for VICE is what Light referred to as the holy trinity.  That would mean “we can create stuff that we want to make, that out audience wants to watch and that attends to brand objectives.”

Generally the panelists didn’t acknowledge experiencing any negative feedback from their audiences due to native advertising and didn’t see any confusion on the part of their readers about sponsored content. Crerar claimed that Buzzfeed still maintains a strict separation of church and state. Those from smaller properties, however, may not have the ability to do that.

Neal Mann of News Corp., who moderated the panel, added another motivating factor for native advertising. “If publishers don’t play in this space what’s to prevent brands from producing their own content and becoming media brands themselves.”

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(Nearly) Live at Social Media Week – Journos With Their Ear to the Ground

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Ken Dowell

If you attended a panel discussion with the title “From Headlines to Hashtags” you might expect to find a group of media types talking about how social has become a key distribution platform, about how they promote themselves and their stories on different networks.

But this group of journalists, including representatives from newspapers, TV and radio in Los Angeles, talked instead about how they listen.

Los Angeles Times Social Media Editor Stacey Leasca, responding to a question about what was the goal of her department, responded “make LA Times a person that people wanted to engage with.” Leasca, who is part of the editorial, not the marketing, department talked about how the Times recently shifted their social media focus to “take a harder look at what our audience is saying.”

Michael Slate, a producer with KPFK-FM, the Pacifica station in LA, talked about how he and the KPFK staff use social media for gathering news. He cited a couple of stories that they would not have known about were it not for Twitter. “Lots of news doesn’t get reported and when it does it gets slanted,” he said, adding that being able to get tweets from people who are on the scene enables the news staff to get beyond the surface of a story. Egypt and Ferguson are examples of that.

Chris Schauble, morning news co-anchor at KTLA 5, is also a committed Twitter user. He pointed out the value of having people being able to tweet information while you are actually on the air. “Twitter turns all of your followers into mini-assignment desk managers.”

As with all journalist and social media panels, there was some discussion of the urgency and immediacy that social media creates as well as some concerns about verifying sources.

The overall impact, according to Schauble, is that there is more breaking news because of the “abundance of information we are all exposed to.” Asked whether he was reluctant to cite other news organizations as sources, he said “we are beyond the day of caring where the attribution comes from. We just want the info.”

Leasca said it is the LA Times policy that they would rather be right than first. She did say there were times when they would tweet a breaking news headline before they had finished the full story.

Slate said, “I treat any story I get with the same rigor.” All agreed with the need to verify social media sources. But Schauble noted that sometimes social media can provide that verification by providing multiple tweets about breaking news.

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(Nearly) Live at Social Media Week – The Future of Money

Posted on September 23, 2014 by Ken Dowell

Do brick and mortar bank branches have a future? Will digital currency make credit cards obsolete? Will the individual investor choose instead to become a crowdfunder?

A Social Media Week Los Angeles panel tackled those questions earlier today as they looked at the impact not only of social media but of technology, apps and mobile on the finance system.

“No Money, No Problem – How Easy Access to Capital is Disrupting Traditional Finance,” the title of the session, is welcomed by crowdfunding champions like Chance Barnett, CEO of crowdfunder.com. He described a “renaissance” of capital availability for startups which has resulted from crowdfunding and the movement of capital markets to online. That of course is a good description of his business. His vision of the future of investing, and for his company, involves opening the early stage investment market to everyone.

William Quigley, managing director of Clearstone Venture Partners, sees changes that have taken place in VC funding as supporting Barnett’s vision of an “opportunity for VC’s and the crowd to play together.” Quigley said that VC’s have become more reluctant to take a position in very early start ups. They are more likely to wait for “some sign of success” after which they will start throwing money, a lot of money, at it.

Quigley also offered the prediction that “all currencies within 25 years will be digital.” He noted two factors that will continue to push the growth of Bitcoin and similar currencies. One is the fact that online retailers all have “redlines” of parts of the world where they don’t do business because it is too risky with credit cards. Digital currency removes the risk of, for example, selling books online in the Ukraine or in Nigeria. He also noted that digital currency offers sellers the assurance that the transaction cannot be “pulled back” as is commonly done in the U.S. with credit card purchases.

Ben Katz, who is the founder and CEO of card.com, talked about how technology is impacting banks. He noted how companies like his own can offer services that target the “9 out of 10 people who don’t matter to banks.” While “banks are on your side if you are someone with $10k or more in your bank account,” the cost of banking has gone down dramatically with online banks that can be accessed by mobile. From Katz’ perspective there will be increasingly less reason for average customers to deal with institutions who have no real interest in them.

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Digital Deception: Wikipedia’s PR Problem

Posted on September 18, 2014 by Ken Dowell

In June of this year a joint statement was issued by 11 PR firms promising to not try to edit Wikipedia articles about their clients without going through “proper channels.” Some of the biggest names in the business were part of this initiative, including Burson-Marsteller, Edelman and Ketchum.

So it is nice to know that the PR folks are going to play by the rules when it comes to Wikipedia. But that begs the question as to why they felt the need to make this pronouncement. I think we all can guess the answer to that one. And in fact in the statement made by the PR consortium they commented “We also acknowledge that the prior actions of some in our industry have led to a challenging relationship with the community of WikiPedia editors.” In other words, PR people have used whatever means at their disposal to circumvent those editors and change the content on behalf of their clients.

Here are some examples:

The most widely cited agent of Wikipedia deception is a Texas based agency called Wiki-PR. If you look up Wiki-PR in Wikipedia you’ll see this. “Wiki-PR is a consulting firm that formerly marketed the ability to edit Wikipedia. It was then banned, including all of its employees, contractors, and owners, by the Wikipedia community for unethical editing.” What the Wikipedia investigation reported to uncover was hundreds of sockpuppets created by this agency to edit its clients’ pages.

A pretty substantial UK PR firm, Bell Pottinger, was caught in 2011 editing its clients’ Wikipedia entries, an act which Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales suggested was an example of the agency’s “moral blindness.”

In 2012 another UK firm, RLM Finsbury, a WPP agency, removed negative information from Wikipedia about the Russian oligarch Alisher Usanov. At the time, Usanov was listing his mobile phone company on the London exchange.

Back in the U.S., the PR firm New Media Strategies employed by Koch Industries, used the sockpuppet MBMadmirer to edit the Wikipedia entries of Charles Koch, David Koch and the page titled “Political Activities of the Koch Family.”

But it is not only PR agencies who are at work on the popular crowd-sourced online encyclopedia. Jamie Bartlett, author of a technology blog in London’s Telegraph, notes that “plenty or people and companies edit their own pages, a practice known in the Wikipedia community as Wikiwashing.” (Wikiwashing: how paid professionals are using Wikipedia as a PR tool.)

An earlier story in the Telegraph pointed to the case of UK MP Chuka Umanna. Seems as though Umanna’s Wikipedia article was amended and the new version compared him to Barack Obama. An investigation to trace that update led to a computer in Umanna’s office.

Bartlett also noted that “a new cottage industry has grown up around Wikipedia, the professional editors.” One such individual is Mike Woods, whose Web site is www.legalmorning.com. Among Woods credentials is an AAS (?) degree in law enforcement from Kalamazoo Valley Community College. Woods describes himself as “an expert Wikipedia article writer with over 10,000 edits and 100’s of pages created.” His pitch: “I know what it takes to make an article notable for inclusion and can get your page published today.”

So what is Wikipedia doing to deal with its PR problem? Most of the instances of sockpuppetry described above were uncovered as part of a Wikipedia investigation. When they are found, the fraudulent accounts are deleted. In November of last year a cease and desist letter was delivered to Wiki-PR, although it appears they have neither ceased nor desisted. The Wiki-PR home page continues to identify itself as “the easiest way to accurately tell your story on Wikipedia.”

Following the statement issued by the PR firms in June of this year, Wikipedia issued new rules that require editors who have a conflict of interest to disclose that fact.

If you are being paid by someone to write or edit information about that individual or organization, that is considered a conflict of interest. Wikipedia’s policy, in that instance, is that the party with the conflict of interest, that is the paid promoter, cannot edit Wikipedia entries directly but rather must use the service’s “talk” pages to recommend changes that will be considered by the Wikipedia editors.

For PR people the stakes are pretty high. Do a search for just about anything and the Wikipedia page is likely to show up as the first or second result. So you can be sure that an agency’s perceived ability to improve a company, organization or individual’s appearance and reputation on Wikipedia may be a key decision making point in determining who gets the job.

From the perspective of the PR community, Wikipedia’s rules are confusing and their responsiveness is slow. A survey taken by Penn State Assistant Professor of Public Relations Marcia DiStaso in 2012 found that only 21% of PR people were aware of and understood Wikipedia’s policies. While the survey didn’t ask why, I would suggest that the results may have more to do with inexperience than with lack of understanding. It’s not that hard to figure out.

You can make the case that no one knows more about a company or organization than that entity itself (and its paid communications contractors). That no doubt is true. But that hardly means they are going to take an even-handed approach to self description. As a pretty frequent user of Wikipedia do I trust PR people as a source? I think I’d prefer my sources to be a bit more unbiased.

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A Baseball Fan Memoir Chapter 2 – Coming of Age

Posted on September 16, 2014 by Ken Dowell

As the 1960’s started I was a 10-year old in 5th grade. At the end of the decade I was in my freshman year of college.

In 1960, the New York Mets existed only as a business plan on the desk of New York attorney William Shea. In the fall of 1969 as the decade was coming to a close they became the most unlikely of World Series champions.

I think we came of age together.

The years following the departure from New York of the Dodgers and Giants were tough years for New York baseball fans, especially those of the National League variety. The rivalry/animosity built up over the previous ten years when there were seven subway series between the Yankees and either the Giants or Dodgers precluded most of those teams’ fans from moving up to the Bronx. My own family attended games in Philadelphia when the Giants were in town rather than go to Yankee Stadium.

shake shackThe Mets came along in 1962 as basically a nostalgia team. Former Dodgers Charlie Neal, Gil Hodges and Clem Labine played a final year or two in a Mets uniform. The great Phillies center fielder Richie Ashburn did one last year as a Met in ’62. They even brought in a veteran St. Louis Cardinals pitcher by the unlikely name of Vinegar Bend Mizell. He lasted a couple months. Our staff ace was another former Dodger Roger Craig. Amazingly he lost 24 games in one season. Even more amazingly he won ten.

This was truly a collection of has beens and they posted a won-lost record of 40-120. Nevermind, we were happy to have them.

And things got even better in 1964 when Shea Stadium opened its doors at the same time that the New York World’s Fair came to Flushing Meadows. A boardwalk was erected between the new stadium and the fairgrounds with the Willets Point subway stop between the two. My family made 3 or 4 trips in each of the two years of the World’s Fair, with each trip ending at Shea Stadium. It was one of the few family activities that we all enjoyed together that I can remember. It also involved the only time I ever remember us taking public transportation as a family.

The Unisphere is a remnant of the 1964 World's Fair. To the left of the Unisphere is a tower that was the New York State Pavillion.

The Unisphere is a remnant of the 1964 World’s Fair. To the left of the Unisphere is a tower that was the New York State Pavillion.

Since my parents showed me how to take the 7 train to Shea, I was set up to make some more clandestine visits with my friends in future years. I remember cutting high school to go to opening day at least twice.

I loved Shea. It was not a great looking stadium and as it aged the orange and blue panels on the outside made it look something of a dump. But it was a baseball stadium built in the shape of a baseball field and the stands were close to the action. It wasn’t too big. It was a much better place to watch a ballgame than at the next generation of stadiums which were the giant all-purpose oval stadiums like Veterans and Three Rivers.

The boardwalk that was originally built to connect Shea Stadium and the World's Fair, now connects Citi Field and the National Tennis Center.

The boardwalk that was originally built to connect Shea Stadium and the World’s Fair, now connects Citi Field and the National Tennis Center.

From 1962 until 1968 the Mets finished last every year except two when they finished next-to-last. In the 60’s the National League East had 10 teams, not five like it has now, so it was no mean trick to finish last year after year after year. On those rare occasions when they slipped up one spot it was at the expense of the Houston Colt 45’s/Astros.

I graduated from high school in the spring of 1969 and headed to college in Ohio that September. That is when strange things started happening at Shea. On Sept. 10 of that year, the Mets moved to the top of the standings for the first time in their history. Then they won their first pennant, played their first post season game, won their first National League championship and on Oct. 16, 1969 won the World Series.

No longer in New York I joined the numerous other New York and New Jersey students at Kent State, filling the lounges of the on-campus dorms. We saw some strange happenings. Ron Swoboda, a guy who played right field as if he had two left feet, started making diving catches robbing the Orioles of hits. Al Weis, a light hitting shortstop who had only two homers in 103 games that year, knocked one out in the deciding game.

But with Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Nolan Ryan and Tug McGraw we had a major league pitching staff. The Mets had come of age. So had I.

Next week’s post will be about how I learned to love the Indians at the “Mistake By the Lake.”

See also Chapter 1 – Childhood Heroes.

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Digital Deception: Catfish

Posted on September 11, 2014 by Ken Dowell

So far in my Digital Deception series I’ve encountered phonies who used their fake identities to promote their products or business, to trash their competitors, to catch criminals or spy on ideological enemies, to spread propaganda or to enhance their reputation. What about those who use fake identities to make romantic connections, either real or online/fantasy?

I think we probably all expect a little creative license in the profiles we see on dating sites. Maybe they’ve added a couple inches of height, underestimated their weight by a dozen or so pounds, lopped a decade or two off their age, or maybe just forgot to mention that not a single hair has grown on their head for a good 10 years now. (A friend of mine writes a blog Not So Smitten with some pretty funny stories about what she found when she came face to face with some online dates.) But these are just sort of the little white lies of dating sites. There are a lot worse.

The term catfish is a pretty appropriate one. If you go to a restaurant and order say Cajun Crusted Fried Catfish you may get a pretty nice looking plate. If you look at the creature your meal was derived from you see a butt-ugly bottom feeder, the human version of which is what you’ll likely find behind a fake dating site profile. I like to turn to the Urban Dictionary for colorful definitions of terms like this. One of the authors demonstrated how to use catfish as a verb: “Did you hear how Dave got catfished last month? The fox he thought he was talking to turned out to be a pervy guy from San Diego.”

Catfish as a moniker for online date phonies can be traced back to a 2010 documentary movie of that name which follows 20-something Nev Schulman as he was in fact smitten by a 19-year old singer dancer who instead turned out to be a 40-year old Michigan housewife. Schulman followed that up with an MTV show by the same name in which he and a partner expose catfish.

One very high profile catfish incident is the curious case of Manti Te’o. Te’o was a football player at Notre Dame and during the 2012 season he very publicly disclosed that he had been playing with the burden of mourning for his girlfriend Lennay Kekua who had passed away from leukemia in September of that year. Turns out, however, that Te’o never met Kekua and that she was in fact the creation of a man named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, who apparently was an acquaintance of Te’o. The whole story was headline news on the sports pages and on ESPN for weeks.

What motivates the creators of catfish? In a story last year in the U.K. Daily Mail, author Hayley Peterson suggests “the fabricated life stories and photographs that they cobble together online often contain the experiences, friends, resumes and job titles they wish they had.”

Some are more sinister than that. Catfish may represent more than a bad date, they may be thieves, con artists or stalkers.  A story in the Guardian from 2011 estimated that 200,000 Brits had been tricked into turning over some money or bank account details through connections they made on online date sites. The usual pattern is the catfish spends some time developing a relationship online then asks for money to deal with some financial hardship or family illness.

The U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command issued a warning about scammers on online dating sites who claim to be soldiers in Afghanistan. They initiate a relationship and then at some point ask for money for transportation or medical supplies.

Digital Trends carried a story in January of this year about a 66-year old divorced woman in San Jose who was scammed out of $300,000. She met a guy on the dating site Christian Mingle who claimed to be an Irishman working on an oil rig. He was really in Nigeria. He sent flowers, he made phone calls and then he asked for help with his daughter’s tuition.  And then he asked for money for his oil rig business which the victim raised by withdrawing from her retirement account and refinancing her home.

Not all of the frauds are coming from the users of online dating sites. A story in the Telegraph of London from July of last year describes how some online dating services use stolen data to create fake profiles as a way to attract customers. The author, Hayley Dixon, quotes a former employee of Global Personals who acknowledges creating fake profiles.

Almost incredulously I found a site where at the click of a button you can create a false identity. www.fakenamegenerator.com asks the gender and country you want to use and then generates a full fake profile with name, address, age and email address as well as details like mother’s maiden name and blood type. You can also use their Sims Family Generator and create as entire fake family. (Tech developers are not always up to snuff on their ethics.)  The site is free and supported by advertising. I found ads for Hitachi, Target and Renaissance Hotels. Those companies are undoubtedly using automated ad networks and have no idea their ads are being placed on a site like this.

I also found a site where you can buy online dating profiles. www.usdate.org offers 10,000 profiles for $18. Not much of a barrier to enter the online dating business. In the story in the Telegraph it is reported that the BBC bought 10,000 profiles from usdate and in those profiles found photos of Brad Pitt and Michael Caine.

DISCLOSURE – I’m way too old to have had extensive experience with online dating sites. My generation used bars. It was harder to manipulate your appearance in a bar, even a dark one, although we often suspected the guy who never took his baseball cap off might be balding. The unattractive often relied on the beer goggle effect. We still created fake profiles but they usually took the form of bullshitting about having a job or offering an enhanced view of your high school sports prowess.

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