CHAPTER 15: One Heartbeat

By 2013 we were 10 years into what had just become Russell Street Report. We’ve all grown proud of the name. Once it became part of sports vernacular in Charm City, people would tell us that they like it even better. Ravens24x7.com will always be near and dear to my heart but its successor isn’t so bad. It’s a bit like Art Modell passing the torch to Steve Bisciotti.

Speaking of whom, I once did an interview with Steve, and when it was over, he complimented our efforts and said that Ravens24x7 was one of his bookmarks.

“That’s interesting”, I said. “I’m glad that we were able to keep that URL when we changed our name to Russell Street Report”. Steve wondered about the change and when I told him that his people forced us to do so to protect his brand, he raised his hands in the air and said, “I had nothing to do with that.”

I know those weren’t just words. Steve isn’t a micromanager. He empowers his people to make decisions and unfortunately (or fortunately depending upon your perspective) one of those decisions forced us to spend money and change our brand. But it all worked out in the end.

By this time in our business’ life cycle, folks had been asking us to do for the Orioles what we’d done for the Ravens. Even though my amateur ball-playing career and sports acumen was much more steeped in baseball, I just never thought that it was worth the time. Covering the NFL has a pattern that makes covering it a bit simpler. Games are played on a specific day, usually Sunday. Postgame analysis follows for a couple of days. Then, the transition to pregame coverage of the next game begins. Rinse and repeat, the cycle begins again and again throughout the season.

If Lamar Jackson soils the bed on Sunday, it’s open season to criticize. If he plays well the next game, you explain why in glorious detail. But if Gunnar Henderson leaves six on base while donning the Golden Sombrero and whiffing four times, harsh criticisms might make you look foolish if he hits a walk-off three-run jack the next night. Plus, there are 162 MLB regular season games, not seventeen.

So, I just couldn’t wrap my mind around how to do it effectively, particularly in this modern era of sabermetrics and all the analytical tools that many other sites offer, all of which are on the leading edge. Even if we played catch up, we’d still be on the bleeding edge. MLB and the Orioles I concluded, just won’t work for us within the confines of our core competencies. To borrow from Dirty Harry, “a man most know his limitations”.

But by 2013, I was open to the possibility.

First, our Senior Editor, Derek Arnold, had experience covering the Orioles with his B’more Birds Nest site and he seemed eager to get a new Orioles site going. And then I thought about the business side of things. An Orioles site could be good for marketing.

You see there were times during meetings with potential customers about advertising in the months of March through June, when they might suggest that we wait until Ravens training camp started in July before considering any advertising proposal seriously. When I’d remind them that our traffic was still robust in March due to NFL free agency; in April due to the NFL Draft; and in May through June due to Ravens OTA’s; they still might want to wait because the mindset is that the Ravens aren’t IN season.

But…

If I had a baseball site to help bridge that football gap, to satisfy that out-of-season mindset and put our reach to work for our customers’ promotional goals and objectives on two platforms, then it made sense to take the baseball plunge.

So, in 2013 we did exactly that, and this time around we would learn from the mistakes we made with Ravens24x7.com and choose a name that the Orioles would never question and one that would marry up nicely with our own football brand. The choice was obvious – Eutaw Street Report, Baltimore’s home for baseball, 24×7.

Initially there was some discussion about merging the two sites together as one, under the name of RussellStreetReport.com since both stadiums sit on Russell Street in Baltimore. But then we jointly concluded that it was best to keep them separate. While most fans in the area support both the Ravens and the Orioles, there are some who are fans of just one of the teams. We soon thereafter set the wheels in motion to build Eutaw Street Report.

We did our best to emulate the success of RSR. And just like RSR, which employs the Facebook page Ravens 247, we married up ESR with Orioles 247.

Another of our attempts to emulate RSR included creating a message board for ESR. Starting a new message board and the accompanying forums from scratch, is not an easy task. Forums are essentially online communities. Communities consist of members. The more members, the more desirable the forum and the more robust the community. Forums with only a few members don’t attract new members. Starting a brand new one is like building a beautiful new restaurant in a bad location.

So, we tried to draw from our own Ravens forums. Surely there were plenty of Ravens fans who are also O’s fans. That would be a good way to jumpstart things – or so we thought. It didn’t work. And then we thought, just as we did with RSR, why not partner up with an existing forum in a mutually beneficial way. We then set our sights on joining forces with Orioles Hangout.

In the past, my paths had crossed with Tony Pente, the owner of Orioles Hangout. We enjoyed a friendly relationship ripe with mutual respect. Tony’s full-time gig placed limitations on how much new, original content he could develop for Hangout but his forums, a go-to community for Orioles fans, was a robust community that essentially ran itself with the assistance of Tony’s moderation. The goal was to create a single entity where we would provide new content for the merged site while Tony would continue to manage the back-end forums. And in joining forces we would have a more powerful publication to market to potential customers.

Eventually we worked out a new legally binding partnership agreement that would become the foundation of a new LLC. The name of the new site would be Eutaw Street Hangout.

But as we got closer to crossing t’s and dotting i’s, I began to feel a little uneasy. If the intent of the merged sites was to offer a more attractive platform for new customers, would the name, Eutaw Street Hangout help or hinder the attractiveness? I could never wrap my mind around the Eutaw Street Hangout name. To me, it sounded amateurish and didn’t really say anything about what we did – who we are.

I then thought to reach out to Megan Olson, a friend who was then a SVP at Media Works, one of the town’s most well-known marketing firms. I shared our plan with Megan as well as the chosen name, Eutaw Street Hangout, to collect her thoughts. She would know how her clients, some big players in Maryland, would respond to the name. Upon hearing Eutaw Street Hangout, the look on Megan’s face told me all I needed to know.

She shared that the name sounded like something for kids and that it wasn’t clear what Eutaw Street Hangout was. Was it a club? A pub? A coffee shop?

Megan confirmed my suspicions. That name had to go, and she even suggested that simply keeping Eutaw Street Report was a better option. But before I went back to my partner Bill Pisano and back to Tony Pente with my discovery, I wanted to have an alternative name ready. It wouldn’t be fair to suggest to Tony that we keep ESR just as I wouldn’t have wanted Orioles Hangout to be the name. So, I had to present an alternative before dumping all over Eutaw Street Hangout. Eventually I came up with Camden Yards Express. Megan gave the name a thumbs up.

A name with “Camden Yards” immediately takes one’s thoughts to Major League Baseball in Baltimore. The word “express” as applied in this situation, had a triple entendre. Express is a nickname for a fastball. The word is also synonymous with transportation and where does Oriole Park at Camden Yards sit? Right beside the old Camden Station, a former train passenger terminal. Lastly, “express” is a term that has been used for a variety of print publications.

The name was a winner – or so I thought.

My partner Bill loved the name. Tony Pente did not. He was determined that any new entity had to have the word “hangout” in its name. He’d spent years building a brand and he didn’t want to detach himself from it. I can certainly relate having gone through some gut churning when abandoning Ravens24x7.com. But the intent of this new partnership was to boost the marketing potential of our combined sites. And if a respected media buyer, someone who sells media to their clients, tells you that Eutaw Street Hangout is a confusing name and one that is unlikely to be embraced by the business community, why spend the time and resources to support it?

Still, Tony wasn’t having it. I respected his position, but we also had ours and there was no compromise in sight, no pun intended. Bill and I both wondered, if a logical name change to Camden Yards Express was such a problem, how might it go in the future when we encounter much more daunting business challenges? It was then that we decided that the contemplated partnership with Tony just wasn’t going to work. And so we parted ways with mutual respect and a lingering difference of opinion.

The train never left the station.

(In Chapter 16 we are confronted by an unexpected and frightening business problem, and we re-visit the idea of a new radio program with a new brand.)

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