News flash: Baseball doesn't trust bloggers

The highly-esteemed Maury Brown published a report by UT Doctoral Candidate (and part-time Express scribe) Avery Holton that shows baseball doesn't necessarily trust bloggers.

Maury Brown:
Baseball front offices are starting to harness the power of social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, and they agree that independent bloggers are important to future coverage, but they have been slow to embrace independent bloggers. According to Holton, there is a perception that independent bloggers are mere fans who don't need a press pass to do their job.

Holton:
"Independent bloggers wanting more access to teams need to continue to advance their credibility through trust and by moving themselves out of the fan category and into the social media arena. Bloggers may be able to achieve this by delivering original, newsworthy content, beefing up their site to reflect the most current in digital media, tracking and reporting increases in their daily site traffic and interacting with baseball front offices on Facebook and Twitter."

This is interesting. There are a few things that we at Astros County won't do. Among them:

1. Push for more followers on Twitter
2. Talk about our site traffic (except for the time we were pretty excited about reaching 100,000 visitors).

So, while we are always trying to deliver original and newsworthy content, we're not interested in pimping ourselves to achieve a press pass. In the same regard, it would be great to make enough money (or even any money, at all) to quit our jobs and pursue Astros County full time. But The Constable is in Nashville, so he's kind of screwed - unless the Astros move the Triple-A franchise to Nashville. If that happens, Houston Chronicle, you'll be getting an email. The rest of us like what we do in real life, and just like to talk about the Astros.

No, we tend to follow the Will Leitch Philosophy of blogging. We do this for fun, and there's a difference between being willing to sell, and being willing to sell out.