We're investing in growing our baseball coverage.
We'd love for your business to grow right along with it.
Beginning this week, we'll double-up our baseball staff when Gerard Gilberto, formerly of Yahoo! Sports and MLB.com, joins Alex Stumpf in full-time duty on the Pirates. Gerard's first official day of work will be Tuesday when he flies down to Bradenton. Between that addition and my own contributions, as well as those of Tom Reed and Jarrod Prugar, we'll have an unprecedented commitment to content -- quality and quantity -- on this beat.
Which is where you come in. Because, candidly, we can't pull this off without you.
To that end, we've got three available sponsorship opportunities of varying shapes and sizes:
• General Pirates coverage: This is the biggie. Your brand gets attached to almost every baseball article we put out, and that includes direct links on all our social media, as well.
• Our Pirates podcasts: The opening segment of my Daily Shot of Pirates is the only one that's still without a sponsor, and we've got two other baseball podcasts we do each week. They're all wide open. In the case of my Daily Shot, it's a live read, meaning I'll actually read it during the segment. Oh, and this one also comes with a social media component.
• Live game/event files: There's no value like a baseball live file here, considering there are 162 of them. They get the heaviest traffic and interaction of any individual files we produce.
Our longtime friends at North Shore Tavern, Pittsburgh's home of steak on a stone and the companion restaurant to Mike's Beer Bar, are batting leadoff in this category, as they've told us they'll sponsor Alex Stumpf's weekly Mound Visit analysis. And we'll be waiting eagerly to see who might be on deck.
Email me directly -- DK@DKPittsburghSports.com -- and let's figure out a fit for you.
NO TROLLING, LIKE, EVER
We've got three simple, clear rules within our commenting community:
1. No politics.
2. No trolling.
3. Really, just don't be a turd.
OK, so the first two are simpler and clearer than the turd ... I mean third. But that second one might cause confusion on occasion, so I'm here to clarify with baseball coming up soon.
If you're a Penn State fan and you're posting all over the Pitt comments, you're trolling. Or vice versa. That's the very definition of trolling. You aren't interested or invested in the subject matter, so you're only there to try to ruin the experience of others.
We get a bunch of this on the Pirates, too. People who say they hate the Pirates or don't care about them or haven't watched them in years or will never watch them again ... but post anyway. Only to ruin the experience of others.
That won't be tolerated this summer. Anyone's free to rip the Pirates or Bob Nutting as they please, obviously. I do both of those myself. So this isn't about not being able to criticize the team or the owner. Rather, it's to cut out the actual trolling, where people who clearly don't care about the current Pirates are there to ruin the experience of others. Which they won't be allowed to do.
WEEKLY APP TIPS
Sharing ways to make your app experience even better:
• Try our new standings, statistics and schedules offered on our Penguins page, right there on the blue horizontal stripe near the top. These are packages we designed ourselves, with our own usage preferences in mind, as we hope you'll experience when you search for information yourself.
Also, within the schedules, you can find boxscores, both current and past. The aim is to have these function live for you to watch as the game's progressing, though we aren't there yet.
We also aim to have Major League Baseball fully updated and ready by opening day, and the NFL is a work in progress.
Our previous two tips:
• We often hear from readers who miss a feature we had on the old app that allowed one to see all content -- every single post -- displayed in the order of publication. We don't have that here yet, but a similar experience can be had by simply tapping the team-page buttons. Choose Steelers, Penguins or Pirates, and all the files will be there in order of publication. Same applies for all four college team pages.
• If you like what you read by someone on our staff, you can find more from that individual by tapping the author's byline on any article or their name on our menu. And while there, you'll also see the author's bio, as well as links to find them on Twitter and/or reach them via email.
BACK TO BUSINESS
• Our page views for the past week were 443,842, up 1.1% from the previous week. Our most-read original piece was Dale Lolley's 10 Thoughts on the Steelers and JuJu Smith-Schuster, at 7,295. Broken down by team, articles on the Penguins brought 32.9% of our traffic, the Steelers 12.3%, the Pirates 11.3%.
• Our new subscribers for the past week were at 71, exactly the same as a week ago.
• Our new app downloads for the past week were 83 for Apple, down from 113 the previous week, and 17 for Android, down from 32 the previous week.
• Our podcast downloads for the past week were 78,582, up 3% from the previous week.
• We're at 39,834 (+134) followers on Twitter, we're at 37,082 (+8) followers on Facebook, we're at 14,433 (-11) followers on Instagram, and we're at 977 (-1) followers on YouTube. These figures are just for our official company account on each platform, not for us as individuals.
• We make mistakes. If you see one, email: Typos@DKPittsburghSports.com
• Anything you need, including lost/forgotten passwords, email: Help@DKPittsburghSports.com
• Oh, and we had 1 active user of our app in Kenya, the gorgeous East African nation I was blessed to have visited as a child. Nairobi, specifically.