By David Saltzer - AngelsWin.com Senior Writer
Since October 2009, the staff at AngelsWin.com has been putting in a lot of work behind the scenes.
See, in the past six months AngelsWin.com has been contacted by ESPN, FoxSports.com/Scout.com, The Japan Times, The Mainichi Daily News (a Japanese Newspaper), NBC News (local), the MLB Network, the Orange County Register and USA Today to either directly provide Angels’ baseball content or to form a strategic partnership to cover the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
During our 2010 Spring Training Fanfest in Tempe, a group from AngelsWin.com gathered to discuss why so many professional news and media outlets were interested in getting our content and/or willing to partner up with us to be a part of their network. In our discussion, we concluded this interest primarily centered around three key aspects of AngelsWin.com: Our content, our community and our passion.
Without a doubt, AngelsWin.com provides unique and relevant content for Angels fans. We cover the Angels’ Major League team and the Angels’ minor league system. We cover the stars on the field and the stars in development. We provide in-depth interviews with players, coaches and key organizational personnel who are often overlooked or not covered by mainstream media outlets. We give a unique take on all that happens within the world of Angels baseball by focusing on the fans’ perspective. We are all baseball fans, but more importantly, we are all Angels fans.
As for our community, with thousands of registered members, Facebook friends and regular readers we could not ask for a better group of people to be a part of our site. Over the years, we have seen strong friendships form; we have seen people help total strangers because of their connection on AngelsWin.com; we have seen people sharing tickets and promotional items all because of their connection on Angelswin.com; we have seen people connect on a multitude of levels. In short, we have seen a true online community form through AngelsWin.com.
But our community is about much more than isolated events. Over the years, we have held our annual Spring Training Fanfests, where we have had more than 50 members attend games and meet special guests at Hail Mary's in Tempe. At our annual Midsummer Fanfests, we’ve had more than 100 members gather at the Big A to play softball, barbecue and tailgate before a game. What started off as mere casual get togethers have turned into formal and organized events, with our community constantly finding ways to improve and outdo the previous year’s events. For more on our 2010 Spring Training Fanfest, please click here. And to see what some of our members say about what the AngelsWin.com community means to them, please click here.
Finally, AngelsWin.com would not exist without our passion. All of our members do what we do because we are passionate about Angels baseball and because we are passionate about AngelsWin.com. While there are other sites that cover the Angels, only AngelsWin.com brings together so many diverse fans, all of whom are committed to watching one team. And with such a diverse, talented and wide ranging staff, AngelsWin.com is truly passionate about providing the best content on the Internet for the Angels.
So, where is AngelsWin.com going in 2010?
As we look forward to and plan for the upcoming season, AngelsWin.com has already formed some new partnerships. On Jan. 26, AngelsWin.com and the Orange County Register announced they have agreed upon a strategic partnership in which all the articles published on AngelsWin.com would appear simultaneously on the Orange County Register’s Website and vice versa.
AngelsWin.com maintains its strong relationship with AM 830 (KLAA) by providing content for the station's Website and publishing clips from Jeff Biggs’ show, The Drive. Additionally, Chuck Richter, founder of AngelsWin.com, will continue to do his segment called “The Richter Scale,” which was heard all season long on AM 830 in 2009, as Chuck will recap the Angels’ top-10 hot prospects for the week, this season via a podcast for all to stream or download.
Beyond that, though, AngelsWin.com is continuing to grow and evolve, but as we do so, we will not sacrifice our three core values: Our content, our community and our passion.
When AngelsWin.com claims to be the No. 1 fan site for the Angels on the Internet, we mean it. Over the coming season, we will be welcoming more writers and providing more content. We will be adding regular feature stories, fantasy baseball features, more interviews and more Angels coverage. Fans will see new writers and new guest columns. Yet, we will still maintain our regular features such as the Eddie Bane chats, the weekly Prospect Hotlist, our game summaries, etc.
We want to continue to provide unique, topical, relevant and interesting content that fans from all ages and all backgrounds will enjoy. We want to provide the kind of content for which hardcore fans clamor. We want to go beyond the “who” and the “what” of a story and provide the “how” and the “why.” In short, we want to continue to fill in the details that other media outlets do not address.
Additionally, we want to maintain our community of fans. Besides our annual fanfests, we will be providing more in-person gatherings and more group events. Already we have a group gathering for games at Chicago's Wrigley Field to attend the Angels’ first visit to that historic ballpark. We want to welcome fans — whether they just finished watching their first game or just finished watching their 1,000th — onto our forums to read, post and engage in dialogue. We want experts and novices to feel welcome on AngelsWin.com. When we say that AngelsWin.com is “of the fans, by the fans and for the fans,” we mean it.
Finally, we want to maintain our passion for Angels baseball and for AngelsWin.com. We truly seek to represent the "voice of the fans." We want fans to share their joy and love of the Angels and of baseball by talking about it on our site. We want fans who are unable to attend a game in person to join us in our Gameday chats and share in the joys and frustrations of the game. AngelsWin.com is a labor of love for many of us and we want you to love it as much as we do.
Over the course of 2010 you will notice some changes to our Website. We believe that in the long run these changes will improve the overall site without sacrificing our core values. We encourage you to participate in AngelsWin.com as much as you can and give feedback as you see fit. If you have a talent or expertise you can share, your contribution is welcomed. And always, if you have an opinion, voice it.
Most importantly, though, we want to encourage you to continue to be the awesome community that we know and love — the community that is AngelsWin.com.
Here's some AngelsWin.com members with their take on the website taken in Tempe, Arizona during the 2010 Spring Fanfest held at Hail Marys on March 6th.
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