Well, for the next 10 days or so, anyway.

Once again in the “Bruce’s great timing” department, I’m heading out this afternoon for some family time. I’ll be gone the rest of this week and all of next week. I might chime in on Twitter from time to time @BruceAllen but for at least part of the time I’m away, I’ll be totally without internet access. That period happens to include Sunday and Monday, so reaction to the Patriots game, win or lose, will have to wait.

I’m looking forward to the rest of the week without sports radio and TV here. On Saturday, I’ll get to watch the games with the other side of the family, who happen to be HUGE 49ers fans. Well at least now they are. Those Bay Area folks are fickle. Maybe that’s what happens when you have local teams in both leagues to root for. The family has big A’s fans, except when the Giants are winning the World Series. Huge Raiders fans in the 70′s, (There’s still a Jim Plunkett autographed photo on the wall of my wife’s grandmother’s spare bedroom) and the 49ers fans in the 80′s and 90′s, and now again. They’re pretty consistent with the Warriors, I guess.

Anyway, should be interesting. If the unthinkable happens Saturday night, at least on Sunday morning I’ll be driving down the Pacific Coast Highway towards San Luis Obispo free from whatever is going on back home.  

While I’m gone, I do have content lined up almost every day. Here’s what it looks like:

Thursday, January 12 – From the PFW Archives, an interview I did with Fran Charles of the NFL Network last year.
 
Friday, January 13 -  Guest column – The State of Network TV Sports News, by Frank H Shorr, Director of the Sports Institute at Boston University

Monday, January 16 - Holiday. I may put up sort of a generic post so that people can chime in the comments section about what happened Saturday night.

Tuesday, January 17 – Guest Column – L.A. To Boston And Everything In Between: A Sports Reporter’s Tale, By Jackie Pepper, former CSNNE anchor and reporter.

Wednesday, January 18 – Guest Column – Why write? Why not? by Michael Gee

Thursday, January 19 – From the PFW archives, an interview I did with Jason La Canfora,  of the NFL Network in 2009.

Friday, January 20 – TBA.

We’ve been having issues with the site here going up and down all morning. At this point, it is unclear whether it is a server issue, or some sort of attack.

You can check for updates on Twitter ( @bruceallen ) or on Google + – Boston Sports Media Watch

Thanks for your patience.

I’m under the weather here for another day, but well enough for a little shameless self-promotion, as BSMW got a nice mention, and I’m quoted in this Mike Tanier column in The New York Times.

Talking Trash, Just to Be Heard

I hope to be back with regular links for tomorrow.

For those of you wondering what David Scott (formerly of Scott’s Shots here on BSMW) has been up to, the UMass grad is now in charge of PR for News Content at ESPN.

After finishing up Scott’s Shots, David co-authored John Calipari’s book “Bounce Back” and served as the coach’s social media and business manager for his first two seasons at the University of Kentucky.

Scott joined ESPN last month, and posted today on the Front Row blog.

Scott’s Shots ran here at BSMW for over seven years, from 2002 to 2009, and was a must-visit part of the site on a weekly basis for many.

Congratulations and best wishes to David on his new position!

Yes, it’s once again time for Bruce’s ill-timed vacation. Each time I go away, something huge happens, and this will be no exception, as the NFL prepares to go back into business. Surely there will be some unexpected move which have the local sports media going crazy, and dwelling on for about a week too long.

During my absence, (I’ll be back August 3rd) I’ve got guest columns and posters lined up each day. I’ve got three guest columns from George Cain, two from Michael Gee and one each from Roy Reiss and Mike Passanisi. Ryan Hadfield, who has been doing a bang-up job on media musings over at SportsOfBoston.com will be by each of the next two Fridays with his media musings and links. Ken Fang will interrupt your regularly scheduled programming with any huge news. These guest columns are terrific, and I guarantee that some of you will say (or just think) “Gee, BSMW is better when Bruce is away.”

There will also be Approval Ratings on most days, but not all. Keep in mind that with me away from a computer most of the time, your comments will not immediately appear unless you’ve registered with IntenseDebate and then logged in here. Otherwise, comments will still need to be approved manually, and that could be very infrequent.

So until August 3rd, enjoy (hopefully) the end of the NFL lockout and (hopefully) the start of free agency and training camp.

If you happen to see this week’s edition of Patriots Football Weekly at a newsstand, be sure to check out my interview with National Football Post founder Andrew Brandt.

Brandt is the former Vice President of the Green Bay Packers, managing their salary cap and negotiating all player contracts from 1999-2008. We talked about his website (he’s trying to make it the Wall Street Journal of the NFL) the ongoing NFL labor situation, and a little bit about the Patriots as well.

In the conversation, we also went into the situations of Tom Brady and Peyton Manning, and how he feels that Brady’s new position as assistant player rep will not impact his negotiations with the club. (He talks more about Brady and Manning on the NFP today.)

The July 27th, 2010 issue is the current edition of Patriots Football Weekly.

For a few months now, I’ve been working behind the scenes with an exciting new startup in the secondary ticket market – TiqIQ and I’m pleased to announce that BSMW is ready to become the official cross-sports Boston partner of TiqIQ.

What is TiqIQ? Basically it is Kayak for tickets. Just as Kayak allows you to search across all the travel sites for the best deals, TiqIQ goes out and grabs all the prices from the top ticket sites out there, like StubHub, eBay, Ticket Network, TicketsNow, etc, and puts them all together in one place so you can find the best deals on seats for the Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics or Bruins. (Celtics and Bruins pages to come as the season approaches.) There are links to the Red Sox and Patriots pages in the nvaigation bar at the top of this page.

While that is great, they go a step further, and provide some great data and content to help you understand the ticket market and make better purchase decisions.  Their content ranges from series previews to series comparison to trends for future games as well and even cool stuff like how much more or less do people pay to see Tim Wakefield start as opposed to a Jon Lester start…Can’t wait for that one!

The centerpiece of the partnership is a buying portal for BSMW that will provide the best overview of what’s going in Boston sports, and be your one-stop destination for any games you are planning to go to or even thinking about going to.

If you’re going to buy tickets through the online secondary market, I hope you’ll consider going through BSMW Tickets to get the best deal and help support this site at the same time.

Specifically, Boston Sports Ticket Watch will include the following features:

• Aggregated Listings: TiqIQ track tickets from major sellers including Stubhub, TicketsNow, eBay and TicketNetwork.
  • We show these in both a Market Tab (Stubhub, TicketsNow, TicketNetwork, eBay) and Auction Tab (eBay)
• TiqZone Categorization: TiqIQ breaks each stadium up into TiqZones, which are groupings of sections that we’ve determined are comparable in value. 
  TiqIQ Statistics: TiqIQ provides ticket-level buying intelligence through the IQ rating and TiqIQ Statistics.
• Event Details: TiqIQ gives you time and location information on the event.

I get a lot of offers for various partnerships here at BSMW, and believe it or not, I turn many of them down, while there are quite a lot of ads here on the site, my goal is to actually reduce the number of various advertisements, and still bring in the revenue I need to run the site. When I first saw the presentation for TiqIQ, I was blown away. This was something I wanted to be involved in, and if it is as successful as I think it will be, you’ll ultimately be seeing a lot fewer ads here on the site.

What you will see is a couple posts a week (in the afternoons) analyzing the Boston sports ticket market, giving you the data (along with some commentary) to make smart decisions on ticket buying, and I just think it’s really interesting looking at the business side of things as well. How well are the Red Sox drawing this season? What’s the market like, and is it indicative of the team’s overall health? There will also be a box in the sidebar with cool data and graphics on the current market as well.

I had concerns that this might pull away from the focus of the site, or “flood” the site with pushy ads trying to get you to spend your money. I don’t see those as worries any longer. The data and commentary I plan to use will be mostly focused, as noted above, on the business side of sports and providing my readers with a great new destination to buy sports tickets.  I hope you enjoy, and ask that you provide us feedback as we get going on anything you like, dislike, or data that you want to see.  You can email BSMW Tickets at [email protected] with any questions or thoughts.

Please email the TiqIQ folks at that address with any issues you might have, as they will be the ones to take care of it for you. The site and service are still in Beta, so please provide them with feedback for improvements.

Lately, I’ve made a change in how I present the morning links to you. For years, I got up and tried to get you a link to every single sports story out there in New England that dealt with one of our pro teams, and occasionally college as well. For the last couple of months, on most days, I’ve linked to just what I thought were the ten or so best or most noteworthy stories from that morning.

The feedback that I have received has been positive, as many of you have expressed appreciation at not being subjected to the likes of Shaughnessy, Borges and others on a daily basis, but only when they actually write something worth reading.

But I want to make sure – do you prefer getting just the top stories, or do you like to get everything, and then try to sift the wheat from the chaff yourself?

Vote below, and also please weigh in down in the comment section. This feedback will be of benefit to me as I try and plan the future of BSMW going forward.

Thanks!

I’m hoping to spend some time over the next couple of weeks reviewing the decade that was in the Boston sports media. These episodes aren’t neccesarily the biggest sports moments of the decade (though some are) but more about storylines that impacted the media, or times when the media completely blew something out of proportion.

The recent media blowups over Bill Belichick’s fourth-down decisions and about Randy Moss’ effort this past Sunday are just hiccups compared to some of the episodes we’ve seen this decade.

In addition to media swarms, we’ve seen mass movement of media types across platforms and employers, we’ve had promiment sports media members pass away this decade, and have seen a huge shift in the perspective from which local teams are covered.

Each weekdayhere on BSMW  until New Years Eve, we’ll be looking at some of the top storylines/episodes in the Boston sports media from 2000 through 2009.

Today’s will be posted in a little while.

The Patriots links this morning were pretty extensive, so I didn’t have much of a chance to get to other stuff. The Red Sox wrapped up their regular season yesterday with a 12-7 win over the Cleveland Indians at Fenway Park.

It’s not known yet whether the Red Sox and Angels will start their American League Division Series on Wednesday or Thursday, though Thursday seems the more likely scenario. Check all the Red Sox news today over at RedSoxLinks.com.

Now for a little spin around the BSMW Network…

Over on Patriots Daily, we’re still recovering from that Patriots win. Chris Warner files his gut check reactions from the victory.

I’ve got your Media Observations, with thoughts on Rodney Harrison, Gary Tanguay and Michael Irvin.

Joe Donahue has a few very early observations on the Bruins.

Ken Fang serves up The Monday Links from around the world of sports media, and also has his Monday’s Viewing Picks.

Outside the network, you need to read the story by Jessica Camerato on Alex Gonzalez, and his three-year-old son who has been in a coma for two years.