Baseball Brand Journalism
Developing the St. Louis Cardinals Video Storytelling
St. Louis, MO – October 6, 2022 - I remember that September day thirteen years ago that the St. Louis Cardinals President and the team’s General Manager asked me to move over to Baseball Operations to work with the Media Relations group.
The department, which played a critical role in the daily work of the team, was short of staff because one person had left the team when his wife got her medical residency in Boston, while another colleague was beginning treatment for cancer.
I was asked to move over to help with baseball communications and build our business communications. At that point, the club had no business public relations. They had an outside PR company that handled all non-baseball specific PR, which was inefficient and expensive.
I was excited and nervous at the prospect. The GM wanted me to move over immediately and start working games. That night, on my way home from the ballpark, I stopped to see if Barnes & Noble had a book on scoring a baseball game.
I knew that the folks that worked in Media Relations were sports information experts adept at keeping score at a game and capable of rattling off stats that define the game. That wasn’t me at all. I loved the Cardinals, but wasn’t familiar with that stats side at all.
My dad died when I was five and I could count on my hands the games I attended as a kid as they were few and far in between. I still had the handful of scorecards I had from those games. Let’s just say they wouldn’t measure up to what you would need from a pro.
My transition to the group was a bit awkward for all of us. I was a fish out of water. Cut from different cloth as it were. I remember being most intimidated by the clunky process of doing game notes. My colleague told me when he traveled with the team, he could spend as much as four of five hours preparing those in Quark.
I remembered Quark being a TV show and didn’t even know it was a layout program. It wasn’t until years later when I had been promoted to VP for the new department of Communications that we migrated to Adobe InDesign to produce that daily document for our media.
The long story made short is I made a conscious decision to focus most of my efforts on doing the things we were not really doing as a group. The group was set up to service the Baseball Writers of America (BBWA) members, but not the typical general news reporter. Those reporters used to reach to my colleague Marty Hendin for their stories, but after he died they didn’t know who to connect with on story ideas.
I focused on helping those reporters, as well as developing our strategy for the social media. It was within that context that I began my long infatuation with brand journalism.
I was a journalism graduate and at one time in my life wanted to be the White House correspondent for a major TV network. Think Sam Donaldson. I had worked as a journalist in college and have nothing but respect and admiration for the work journalists do within our democracy.
I’m not sure where I first heard the term “brand journalism” but know it was during this period of time. I looked to several brands that were using it within their communications. McDonalds. Home Depot. Coke.
I knew the Cardinals had invested in brand journalism and telling their own story for years. The game broadcasts are owned by the team. The radio announcers work for the team. The team had published Cardinals Magazine for close to two decades at that point.
Growing up catholic in St. Louis, my family would get the St. Louis Review, a weekly newspaper delivered to our house. We also received AAA Magazine. So the concept of telling your own story from your own point of view seemed as basic and common sense as using an umbrella (or Brock-A-Brella) in the rain.
In developing our strategy for social media, we decided that brand journalism would be the foundation for what we did. We would share the who, what, where, when and how of our story. Report the WIGO (what is going on) in real time.
We focused our strategy around the basics. What is brand voice? What are our brand standards? How would we ensure that we spoke with a consistent voice even though multiple staff members with the team (and MLB) would be responsible for posting?
It was during this early period that we started using hashtags. Over the years, we were smart about hashtags and sometimes not.
When we rebranded our twitter account, we named it @cardsinsider to distinguish it from the MLB run account at the time. We wanted fans to know we worked inside the front office and would give them that level of access.
When I started doing video storytelling using my iPhone, I ended up using an app called Videolicious. I paid for the upgraded version so I could add a logo I created that had #CardsInsider.
When we started producing our own brand journalism TV show, we named it Cardinals Insider. We took over the production of a show called Cardinals Nation that was on the local NBC affiliate KSDK.
We used that name because it conveyed our mission and point of view. We worked for the team as Cardinals Insiders and we would share stories using brand journalism.
The first season of the show was hosted by my colleague Lindsey Weber who did a wonderful job hosting and producing the show. The second year, we recruited Hall of Famer Ozzie Smith to host the show. He was and is amazing. The professionalism and preparation he brings to hosting a weekly TV show speaks to what kind of person he is in all he does. You can see why he became a Hall of Fame baseball player. His commitment to excellence shows in his work ethic.
While most brands may not have the opportunity to produce a weekly magazine TV show that they distribute under a trade agreement with 18 over the air TV stations, it is a good example of what you could do.
The landscape of media has changed a lot in my lifetime. YouTube is a game changer. I was able to post a YouTube video with this post for free. While I have no illusions that is will reach a global audience, the fact that it could is amazing.
The reality is that if you have a website and on social media, you are a media outlet. Today media is shared. It is about the shared link or the streaming link.
Brands can learn a lot from our baseball brand journalism. You can own your own story. Control your narrative. You can connect honestly and authentically with your target audience by using brand journalism as part of your video storytelling.
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