As the owner and C.E.O. of WNST.net since 1998, I believe the most important trust in running Baltimore’s longest-running sports information company is listening to the needs of the marketplace.

It’s the fans of the Orioles, Ravens, Terps, Caps and other issues of Baltimore sports concern that put us in business and keep us growing and healthy in 2012.

As has been our custom over the past two decades, I’m always available to receive emails at nasty@wnst.net concerning any issue at WNST.net. (Or as Peter Angelos famously lied to me in 1997: “I’m a very available individual…”)

Today, I’m asking you to give me a report card on how we’re doing here at WNST. We’d sincerely appreciate an honest appraisal of the way you use Baltimore sports media in 2012 and the way you view WNST.net, our competitors and, hopefully, some helpful suggestions on ways we could improve what we’re doing.

As an incentive, we’ll take one lucky winner and a friend to exotic Cleveland, Ohio for a weekend of football and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in November on our WNST Purple Football Roadtrip, courtesy of Jiffy Lube.

And we’ll never sell or share your information. So, take a few minutes if you can and perhaps you’ll be our big winner!

TAKE THE 2012 GREAT BALTIMORE SPORTS MEDIA REPORT CARD HERE

Do we suck? Are we awesome? What are we missing? How can we better service you? What do our competitors do that you like? What do you love about WNST? What do you dislike about WNST?

Every two years we do a major survey to gauge how we’re doing. But the media world changes and evolves at a frightening speed in 2012 with mobile devices, tablets and the instant distribution of thoughts, news, observations and information.

Many, many things have changed in the Baltimore sports media scene since I began working at The News American in January 1984. As a kid who saw that hot metal type line up on newsprint and then watched and learned at The Sun from 1986-1992 to doing sports radio locally and nationally, I’ve picked up many hints and plenty of help along the way to create a company that is boldly local, proudly independent and enduringly honest.

I’ve dedicated my entire life to Baltimore sports and to the journalism, information and analysis that goes with it. This is the only thing I’ve ever done with my life and I want WNST.net to be the best and biggest media company in the marketplace.

We want to be the media organization that serves you the best. Unlike our “small” AM radio signal, you can now take WNST.net everywhere in the world you go…

We’re always looking for a deeper level of engagement with the fans we already have via Baltimore sports. And more so than any other voice on the internet bringing you Baltimore sports reaction and analysis, we are striving for perfection and your attention at WNST.net.

In the old days, you had to go to your radio to get your WNST fix. Now, via mobile devices, we’re in your pocket everywhere you go, every hour of the day.

We’re hoping to connect with you in a more meaningful way and to better serve Baltimore sports fans as mobile grows and your tastes evolve. Over 21 years of doing radio and now almost 15 years of WNST as an entity, we’d like to strengthen our relationship with Ravens, Orioles, Terps, Caps, lacrosse and local high school programs.

Unlike morning shows with guys from New York and Boston and “experts” from the Washington suburbs and parts of upper Michigan and St. Louis, the crew at WNST.net is always local and has lived the history of Baltimore sports.

Now we’re asking you: has WNST.net done a good job of this?

Judging from every measurement we can find on the internet – Twitter, Facebook, Google Analytics, reaction to our posts and opinions, we’re doing a damned fine job.

But we can always be better.

This is where you come in…

In our market, quite frankly, it’s been about authenticity and credibility.

WNST builds our audience through quality programming, content and distribution. And then we build relevance for local marketers and businesses who keep us in business because of your support of their sponsorship of our programming and information.

When you support a WNST sponsor you directly affect our ability to improve and keep bringing you the best Baltimore’s best sports coverage divinely possible.

So, as Bruce Springsteen might say, bring on your Wrecking Ball and give us some feedback. We’re thick-skinned. Any constructive criticism or feedback is always welcome at WNST.net.

Once again, here’s a link to our report card and survey…

After three months of exhaustive research, work and auditions, we had a very difficult decision in anointing the 2012 Baltimore Sports Media Superstar crown on Thursday night at Hooters in Towson.

After a lengthy debate and a myriad of input and criteria — from facts, knowledge, video & audio tryouts, live audiences, trivia challenges and panel conversations — we arrived at three winners who will split the $1,000 prize for the 2012 title.

Congratulations to Daniel Radov, Jeff Kryglik and Brett Dickinson for sharing the title this year. All will be given opportunities to participate at WNST.net & AM 1570 this fall as we ramp up our football and weekend coverage, led by the re-emergence of Fox Sports Radio at WNST.

Many of the remaining 13 finalists will also be given chances to contribute at WNST.net as well.

Here’s the speech I gave last night regarding the process and the presentation of the winners:

Yesterday news broke that there was a chance that the Ravens and Joe Flacco could come to terms on a long term contract by the time training camp rolls around; a “75% chance” to be exact.  I’m sure most fans were excited to hear this, as was I.  But when a report comes out like this, it’s important not to trust it blindly.

You see, teams will sometimes leak this information in order to sort of “put the ball in the players court”, so that if a deal doesn’t get done the player (Joe Flacco in this case) might look bad.  Well, Flacco’s agent, Joe Linta joined Drew Forrester this morning to address the chances that Joe Flacco signs before training camp.  He said rather sarcastically (in regards to the ‘75% chance’), ““That was news to me. That’s good. That’s a good number”.  Quite simply put, there is no timetable on when it will get done.

Ravens fans shouldn’t really expect a deal to get done in the near future.  In negotiations like this (where there is no timetable, unlike Ray Rice) the two parties will usually talk things over for a while.  “You want to understand what their sides hot button, important issues are. They have to understand ours. We shake hands. We hug and we go at it. It’s not personal. It’s not the vitriol filled room that a lot of people might think,” Linta said.

Linta said Flacco really isn’t even worried about when it gets done which is very good news for the Ravens and fans.  He said, “Money is secondary to him to the winning and the success he enjoys with the team.”  This should make Ravens fans happy because the last thing we need is another player who’s mind is not on football when it should be (ahem…Ed Reed).  Flacco is focused on winning games like he has done throughout his career.  “His primary focus is to go out and play the game and win for the town and himself…He has a real affinity for this town,” said Linta.

Quite frankly, Ravens fans are lucky to have a player who generally cares about the city, wants to win for everyone and who is a top flight quarterback.  Flacco takes so much undeserved criticism from people, including a large majority home town fans.  It always amazes me how fans around here can criticize the best QB we have ever had here by a long shot.  When did people become so spoiled?

Linta believes that it is due in large part to some of the mainstream media.  He says, “There are people in the media who don’t watch the film so all they have to go on is statistics. There are a lot of guys that are on television that don’t know the difference between touchdown and goose down yet they are analyzing Joe Flacco’s performance. You have to laugh at that but they become influential to the public at large.”

And that’s just it.  Flacco’s numbers obviously aren’t the best but if you actually watch him play.  If you actually see what he does with the below average supporting cast (minus Ray Rice) around him, it’s hard to argue that he is not one of the best QB’s in the league.

Flacco also has a great deal of confidence in himself.  Lack of confidence is often a downfall of some quarterbacks.  Ravens fans, however, do not have to worry about this with Joe.  Not to mention Joe’s calm attitude.  “Nothing upsets him to the point where it deters his performance. That’s an amazing quality and one you really look for in a quarterback,” Linta said.

Joe is the perfect QB for this town.  He cares about winning, he wants to stay here, he is focused on football rather than money and he is blue collar type of guy.  What more could we ask for?  Joe will lead us to the Promised Land, but he can’t do it alone.  He needs your support.  So stop criticizing his every move and just let him do his thing.

In its entirety, this is a 90-minute speech that I delivered to an upper-level sports marketing class at Loyola College in Spring 2012.

I’ve spent 21 years learning about this stuff. I’m glad you found my blog to hear and watch my thoughts on where Baltimore sports media is heading over the next decade.

If you make it through this series, I’d love to hear your feedback at nasty@wnst.net

Here are the finalists for our Baltimore Sports Media Superstar competition, brought to you by Hooters for Thursday, July 26th:

Daniel Radov

Brett Dickinson

John Sears

Jeff Kryglik

Simon Habtemariam

Josh Levine

Adam McCallister

Mark Brown

Robert Testoni

Chris Cichon

Jeff Gilley

Andrew Tomlinson

Scott Zolotorow

All remaining contestants will continuing blogging, writing and tweeting about Baltimore sports over the next 10 days before our championship event at Hooters in Towson next Thursday.

Can our WNST Baltimore Sports Media Superstars pass the test? You can be the judge now with all of the action from Monday’s packed live show at Hooters in Towson right here at WNST.net:

While in the process of putting together as many details and helpful hints as possible for our next Baltimore Sports Media Superstar, I’ve been going through some old blogs and media information that I’ve dispersed over the years here at WNST.net.

All of the details of our Baltimore Sports Media Superstar search and competition are now a click away if you want to be a contestant: http://wnst.net/wordpress/wnst/the-2012-baltimore-sports-media-superstar-search-is-underway-at-wnst-net/

This recent blog is very thorough and should answer all of your questions and most of your concerns. I sincerely hope you join the competition and begin your first blog today! This weekend has been active with participation and questions and entries to nasty@wnst.net.

Please do not send docx files as attachments. I’d appreciate all resumes in a pdf or .doc format for sharing purposes.

Also, our hashtag for the competition will be #WNSTBSMS and all Twitter activity should include this easy 8-digit shortcode for WNST Baltimore Sports Media Superstar.

If you want some extended reading, helpful hints and some of the WNST philosophy (and reality) please see my “State of Baltimore Sports Media” series from January 2010 here:

Part 1: Where Do You Get Your Info and Whom Do You Trust In Baltimore Media?

Part 2: How Does WNST Measure Up To Other Baltimore Media?

Part 3: Content and Distribution: Sharing Is Caring

Part 4: Power of Partnership: Flogging The Flag

Part 5: What Is The Future Of Sports Media In Baltimore?

And my three-part update in May 2011:

Part 1: What WNST Stands For In Local Media

Part 2: Journalism is dead…but not at WNST

Part 3: People Ask Me All The Time, “How Big Is Your Stick?”

These blogs are almost a “handbook” and should make the position and our needs at WNST.net even more clear. But, granted, it’s going to take you a few hours to read it and years to digest it but the more you know and understand about the local sports media industry the greater your chances of success.

I wish someone would’ve given me a handbook back in 1992

As a bonus, here’s Part 3 of my Loyola lecture on women, video and mobile streaming in 2012…

It was so much easier when I was growing up, this sports media thing. First, you learned how to write and then you went to some journalism or “communications” college or university, you did an internship and then sent resumes out and you got your dream job and lived happily ever after.

And maybe you got a gold watch if you hung around at the newspaper or TV station for 25 years or more?

Here at WNST.net this summer, we’re extending an open offer to any Baltimore sports fan who wants to be the next Baltimore Sports Media Superstar via our competition. All of the info is here…

The harsh reality of media and new media in 2012 is that it’s an all-encompassing commitment of time, experience and continuing education that makes a local personality or entity relevant as breaking news, information, analysis and the games themselves fly by in real time with your mobile device with you at all times.

And that’s just the content side.

Here’s a speech I gave to a Loyola Sports Marketing class in May 2012. This is Part 1 in a series about my current thoughts on the state of Baltimore sports media and the industry as a whole:

If you can’t sell your own personal brand – by bringing in audience, engaging them, adding value to their life experience and adding expertise or analysis that people care about – you will NOT be successful in the new media world.

If no cares to be your audience – or in this era that would be “opt in” or “follow” or “subscribe” — then no one will be available to stimulate the commerce necessary that ultimately will pay your salary via local sponsorship dollars..

In the old days it was easy – there were three TV channels, a few radio stations and a newspaper or two. Whoever the local program director or editor hired was all that the public got and all that you’d ever get from the “inside” of a sports team. The competition for those scarce jobs and the outstanding pay via expensive local television news ads fueled by automotive dealers and local advertisers was all coveted. And the public in Baltimore essentially had three choices for the 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. news – WBAL, WMAR and WJZ. There were two newspapers – The Sun and The News American. And sports radio didn’t exist except for Charley Eckman screaming bloody murder about some local issue on the Johnny Walker show on WFBR.

That was the entire world of Baltimore sports media in the 1970’s and 1980’s.

And the only ones who really did it the “new world” way were Coach Eckman and Tom Davis, who bought and sold their own “in-show” advertising and made far more money than most radio “talking heads” did and certainly more than the folks at The Sun or The News American.

All of the TV and newspaper people were part of a larger ensemble and staff. The radio sports talk guys needed to fight for audience and those radio stations needed hosts who garnered real traffic and real new business for local sponsors and advertisers.

This is the world I lived in on local AM radio from 1992 until 2006, when tens of thousands of you crashed my webpage and my email with traffic from all over the world after the initial “Free The Birds” walkout and showed me a new world of WNST.net on the internet.

In the new media world, if you can’t sell your own brand as a sports media expert then how can a local sponsor or business owner trust that you can help them sell pizza or cars or beer?

The reality is that I’m in college every day at WNST.net. The college of life, emerging media and business in 2012 and how it relates to the changing ways of sports fans’ consumption of information via mobile devices in real time.

It’s taken two decades but I’ve finally figured out why I went to college back in the 1980’s. All of those beers at Jay’s off campus at the University of Baltimore and all of those evening classes about Marshall McLuhan — it’s all finally paid off. All those classes with Julie Simon and discovering the roots of communication and theory of how the “medium is the message” and emerging “global village” has changed the world in the last decade since the internet has extended our FCC towers at what was formerly a “little AM radio station” at WNST-AM 1570 and brought video and words and statistics and instant feedback into the realm of the palm of our hands via mobile via WNST.net.

I’ve finally figured out the value of my University of Baltimore education and Corporation Communications degree – it just took me 20 years!

While I’m not going to be donating to UB anytime soon – or anytime that the name of Peter G. Angelos

Steve Bisciotti was part of the NFL ownership that elected Roger Goodell the commissioner of the league back in 2006. After negotiating an unprecedented deal last summer and sparing the American sports public a nasty and protracted labor dispute, Bisciotti assesses Goodell’s tenure and talks about where the NFL is headed over the next 10 years.

Here’s part of my sitdown with The Boss today in Palm Beach:

This blog was originally published two years ago. We’ll be revisiting this with a three-part series and updating these thoughts with a new 2012 WNST “State of Baltimore Sports Media” survey next week while we broadcast live from Indianapolis all week. This is Part 3 of 5: The State of Baltimore Sports Media (circa 2010).

The saddest day of 2009 for any Ravens fan was also the day that I saw the state of the world had changed for WNST.net via the instant power of our text service. On the 4th of July at 4:17 p.m. I was sitting at home watching midday holiday baseball when I got a tip from a friend that Steve McNair had been murdered.

After receiving that quick text, I jumped onto the computer and saw that every Tennessee TV station was reporting his murder within the previous five minutes. At 4:21 p.m. more than 3,900 people received a WNST Text reporting the only facts we knew: “Tennessee media is reporting that Steve McNair has been murdered. More to come…”

At 4:50 p.m., ESPN finally reported it. And at 5:37 p.m. – a full 76 minutes later, The Sun finally had it on their website.

While I was blogging feverishly, looking for any information I could get from Nashville in the first 30 minutes on a sweltering holiday summer day – monitoring all of their TV stations and newspapers and fielding a wide variety of emails, Tweets and texts – apparently the 3,900 people on our WNST Text Service had taken matters into their own hands in forwarding our message to tens of thousands of other people like a game of virtual phone booth. More than 23,000 people had visited my blog by 8 p.m. on a premier national holiday on a day when virtually no one was in front of a computer. They were all coming from the palms of theirs hands via their mobile devices.

THAT – in the previous 25 years of my media existence — would have been impossible in the old, dinosaur world of local news. And it certainly would’ve been exclusively the area of the three local TV stations and, probably, WBAL Radio. But in the new world, they were all coming to the local source of the breaking sports news: WNST.net.

But the one thing about our WNST Text Service that often goes without saying is this: when we report it, you KNOW it’s true. Through our own goodwill, hard work and credibility, we have established a reputation for never, ever being wrong on a news story. And there are now more than 5,200 of you on the WNST Text Service.

Join the WNST Text Service…

And it goes without say that “timeliness” and the element of surprise is, in fact, the essence of what makes it “news.” News is immediate. News is shareable. News is eternal.

And, clearly, not all news is good.

But the depth of our content was also apparent on that sad, summer day. Ironically, we had video of Steve McNair joining about 1,200 Ravens fans in Nashville to greet them from January of last year before the big playoff game in our You Tube video vault. It’s a really weird clip — especially given it was the last time he’d do anything with his Baltimore roots. We raised $5,000 that night last January for the Air McNair Foundation and the Baltimore Ronald McDonald House. I had given very little thought that night at Limelight in Nashville that I would never see Steve McNair alive again.

Like most breaking news stories – and all tragedies – it was completely unpredictable that Steve McNair could die