Final CMCI Produced Story: Baseball in Colorado
Who doesn’t enjoy a trip to the ballpark? Competitive baseball, cold beer, hot dogs, and nice weather make for a great afternoon or evening out. It is the quintessential American sport, so I wanted to examine what baseball is like in a quintessentially American state like Colorado. Are people as ravenous about pro baseball like in cities with a rich baseball history like Boston, Chicago or New York? What are the options aside from the Rockies for those who want to attend a baseball game? What is the deal with the lack of a Division I baseball team at University of Colorado Boulder, Colorado’s flagship university? I was looking to answer these questions and more with my social media storytelling.
So what did I do? Well, I played to my strength as a writer and wrote three pieces on Medium:
Of those three pieces, I posted one on WordPress to experiment with a different blogging platform. I have to say that I prefer Medium, however.
My live element was done on Facebook Live through the CMCI Facebook group page. My link to it is here. My intent was to showcase a fan’s perspective of the CU club baseball team’s big game against CSU, so I did about 22 minutes of filming over about two innings of the game.
I outlined the process of creating a media guide for the University of Colorado Boulder club baseball team on Imgur. This was my experimental portion of the project:
I also did a Reddit post on the background to creating the guide. I linked my Google Doc to the Reddit post and explained why and how the media guide was created.
I did an Instagram story while I attended a Colorado Rockies game. This was probably the coolest part of my project, as I get behind the scenes a little bit in Coors Field. I have video of the dugout, a photo from the press booth, and four minutes of the talk manager Bud Black gave to my journalism class.
And finally, Twitter. Ahhhh Twitter. How I can’t wait to delete you when I’m done with this class. My Twitter strategy was to retweet anything I saw related to baseball or baseball history in Colorado that did not come from the Rockies official account, since that frankly seemed redundant. I also shared my Medium blogs and Reddit/Imgur post(s).
I tried to promote Aubrey Stenger’s medium posts because our projects are similar:
And lastly, I did a tweet thread showcasing the CU club team player bios that didn’t make my Imgur post.
Trying to pinpoint what I learned about baseball in Colorado and communicate it through social media was difficult. I am not an avid user of social media, except Instagram. I go to college to learn new things, so I tried to avoid over-using Instagram. However, that meant learning about social media platforms that felt foreign and downright confusing at times. Twitter and Reddit were among the main culprits. I also failed to produce the podcasts I wanted; I learned in the process that I am a better writer than I am a podcaster. Finally, timing was maybe the most difficult part of using new social media platforms. I found it difficult to accurately plan ahead and use my time wisely which unfortunately shows in my work.
It’s not all doom and gloom. I had a lot of fun experimenting with the new platforms. I felt like a real journalist when I went to the Rockies and took pictures and videos of the game. I was able to support my university’s baseball team as a fan when they needed it the most. I obtained a better understanding of the gritty process of creating a media guide for a team. I researched and answered my initial inquiry as to why CU does not have a DI baseball team. I learned a lot about the history of the sport within the Centennial State and as a history nerd that makes me very happy. I got to see Trevor freakin’ Story launch an absolute bomb at Coors Field! As a baseball fan, I am glad that Colorado has such a long history with a sport I love, and I am happy to have been given the chance to curate this history on social media.
After this project, I can truly say that Colorado loves baseball as much as I do. The sport is in good hands here.
That’s a grand slam to me.
