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Time to Say Good Bye

We've have a great run. But now it's time to say goodbye.

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Monday, October 1, 2012

Time to Say Good Bye

We've have a great run.



But now it's time to say goodbye.



NBA-FP started as video podcast in 2008, that proved to be very successful.

It was birthed from my time at Turner Sports covering feature stories. 

Dayvee Sutton with the NBA Championship trophy


At the time, there wasn't an outlet to share off-the-court stories, but I knew there was an audience. 
Fast forward to today, and the success of TMZ has proved all of my doubters wrong.

Two years after our launch, and after the demand for a blog grew, I finally gave in and created this space.
I knew it would be daunting, but with the help of great supporters I was able to keep it going.

Thanks to all of our writers: William L. Falkenhainer, Marty O'Connor, Chris, TJ, Mike Feld, Zachey, Joseph Genovese, Ericka Birdsong, Joey Murr, Manny, Tommy Zukoski and Deniz Kofteci for believing in the vision, giving me a chance and sharing your talent as a writer with us.
In 2009 I met Joel Hillsman who believed in my vision and eventually would partner up with me to help run the operations. He really held us down until the very end.
Joel Hillsman has moved on to make his name as a key broadcaster for the National Football High School Network.

It was fun to see this blog and video web series grow. The game changer was Deniz Kofteci broke the story of Kris Humphries and Kim Kardashian. I remember the call she gave me and when we went with it, it changed the popularity of our little operation. I watched the ticker that tracked our site stats go bonkers, and I thought it was broke. Over night, we had over 40,000 new readers, and we were the website named as breaking the story.

Then our investigation on the Tony Parker/Eva Longoria divorce, which gave new perspective of what main stream media reported, was another game changer. While everyone reported that Tony Parker cheated on his wife with a former teammate's wife, our sources, which included staff from actress Penelope Cruz, staff with the Spurs and our L.A. reporter, drew out the story that Eva Longoria (also) cheated on her husband, with Cruz's brother. And months later, after the divorce was finalized, Eva introduced the world to her new beau- Eduardo Cruz. 

One thing I was adamant about, was that I never wanted to have a retraction with our stories, no matter how risky they were. And we accomplished that!

The web series was the foundation of this whole operation and something I am very proud of. At first, I rigged a studio in my camera. I would curate stories all week, then produce, record, upload on Thursdays. It would take six hours to do this.
The first seasons of NBA FrontPage were shot by me from my home studio.

In 2009, Thea Marcacci and Jeff Batten allowed me to use the Atlanta Broadcast Institute to record the web series. It was great to have their help, but still hard work and long days.

We had rotating help, but Thea, Joel, and hosts Angelica Suffren and Jennifer Mackey, held the show down when I moved from Atlanta, GA to Charlotte, NC.

I loved what we were building. I just needed to quit my job to make it reach it's full potential. But, as broadcast  TV opportunities continued to present themselves, I just couldn't keep up both. 

And now we are here. I think we had a good run. I contemplated in the off-season to bring it back. But after discussing it with Joel, as a business, it was no longer worth it for either of us.

It's been four years. Everything has a season. The NBA teaches us that. Four All-Star Games, and Four Finals. We truly love this game, the community we built and this website was for the love of the players.

Good night NBA FrontPage.



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

great post, very interesting to see your story

Anonymous said...

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