Frank the Tank
Active Member
Agreed. As I noted in an earlier post in this thread (which seems to be in moderation again for some reason), I wrote a sports blog that got a fair amount of visitors when I was writing about college sports conference realignment several years ago (where I was spurred to write mainly out of frustration that I didn’t think the mainstream media analyzed its issues correctly at all). Multiple mainstream sportswriters reached out to me and told me that the commissioner of the Big Ten and the other power conference commissioners actually read my blog. (Note that Disney, via ESPN, sends those conferences hundreds of millions of dollars per year and was instrumental on the financial side of conference realignment.)
In fact, one writer confirmed to me the exact same process in the Big Ten office that you’ve noted likely goes on at Disney and many other companies: multiple staffers would research fan forums and blogs for key insights on realignment (or whatever other pressing topics of the day) and present them to the top executives on a daily basis.
To be sure, my blog was focused on the “inside baseball” of the college sports business, so that’s why it had more of a chance of getting seen by the actual powers that be. Similarly, this particular forum is well-known for the “inside baseball” of TWDC, so it’s not a surprise that Disney executives (or their staffers) would keeps tabs here.
