John Bonnes

Thanks for jumping in and this is a good I was wondering if you found any contracts you thought were comparable. Specifically, which ones? I’d be interested in comparing them. (I also wonder about the willingness of this front office to give a multi-year deal to a fairly average veteran. I’m not sure I see that happening.)

It's also a new organizer, and I know one of his focuses early on was to leverage the accessibility of the players. We also had a blast with our table last year.

Last year we had one table and this year I expect at least three. I'd like to get as many as five. If you have any questions, make sure to list them below. Thanks, John

Our presale for the Winter Meltdown was a little too successful. We SOLD OUT our first batch of tickets. But if you want to really rub elbows with the Twins best while supporting a great cause, we're releasing a dozen more for people who sign up for the Twins 2018 Diamond Awards. Just get your tickets here, and let them know you want to sit at the Twins Daily table in the comments. What are the Diamond Awards?They're awesome, truly a bucket list item for Twins fans. It’s the night before Twins Fest (Thursday, January 18) at The Depot. It’ll be a star-studded affair including an awards dinner celebrating the Diamond Awards winners like Brian Dozier, Ervin Santana, Byron Buxton, Trevor Hildenberger and Joe Mauer. Plus, this year you can win a chance to attend a future Twins game with local celebrities like GB Leighton, Lindsay Whalen or Andrew Zimmern. Tickets are $150 each but the proceeds go to the University of Minnesota to cure some pretty terrible diseases, like ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), ataxia, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, and Parkinson’s disease. It is a great cause and a fantastic time and Twins Daily would love to share it with you. To join us, just write that you want to be at the Twins Daily table in the “comments” box at the end of the signup form. Or, if you’ve already signed up, let me know in the comments below and I’ll work with the organizers to make sure you are seated with us. We would love to get a big group together and talk a lot of baseball or get your thoughts on the site. So to sweeten the pot, you'll also get free tickets to the Winter Meltdown on January 20th, from 4:30 to 7:30 at Brother's Bar and Grill, for you and a friend. We already have 500 Twins fans joining us, and right now this is the only way to still get tickets to this sold out event. And if you already have tickets, we’ll give you a refund on the tickets you already bought. This is truly a special opportunity to attend one of the Twins premier annual events that celebrates their team and their fans. (Actually, it’s a special opportunity to attend TWO such events.) Plus, it’s an exceptional cause and a chance to see the best of the Twins on one of the coldest weekends of the year. Let’s recharge our batteries and get ready for a great weekend and a great year together. If you have any questions or concerns, use the comments. But please click the link below and give it a try this year. You won’t regret it. BUY TICKETS OR LEARN MORE HERE Click here to view the article

Aaron and John talk about the pros and cons of the Twins signing reliever Zack Duke, the overall state of the Twins' bullpen, assault allegations against Miguel Sano, Mike Napoli rumors, brunch at Iron Door Pub, the sold out Winter Meltdown event, and waiting on Yu Darvish. (Sponsored by Harry's Razors and RxBar.) You can listen by downloading us from iTunes, Stitcher or find it at GleemanAndTheGeek.com. Or just click this link. http://traffic.libsy...3?dest-id=74590 Click here to view the article

No, this event had nothing to do with Twins Daily. I assume it was a Fan HQ event. As for the details and corroboration, it sounds like this happened inside a hallway at the mall, and the others may have been outside at a car? Or at least I saw a link to a story where Rob Plummer, Sano’s former agent, said he was outside waiting near the car.

A couple of quick notes: We love Betsy. We completely support her and her telling her #MeToo story.Betsy has volunteered as a photographer for several Twins Daily events and as a credentialed photographer at Twins game several times over the last few years. We proudly use her photos in our stories.Tangentially, Twins Daily has not been “stripped” of access. We are never guaranteed access (as we are not members of the BBWAA) but in general, the Twins have accommodated our requests.

This morning, photographer Betsy Bissen posted assault allegations against Twins third baseman Miguel Sano. The incident took place at an autograph signing event where Bissen worked as a volunteer. [Editor's note: Bissen has also volunteered as a credentialed photographer for Twins Daily.]On Twitter, Bissen detailed the assault charge. "I pulled back as he held onto my wrist. It hurt, how badly he was grasping at my wrist, but he wouldn't let go. I wasn't going to give up my fight though. He then leaned down and tried to kiss me, more than once. Every time he did, I said no and kept pulling back. I was in a squatted position with my wrist throbbing. I screamed, no one came to help me. He finally gave up after a solid ten mins of fighting to pull me thru that door." Click here to view the article

Thanks Thrylos. It's good hearing from long-time bloggers like myself, as we tend to have a different perspective than most. I agree about the specific content, but that's one of the things I like about the organic model. It lends itself to surprising content. Tom's game recaps are a great example - I knew I wanted something like that on the site for a long time, but he brainstormed it and ran with it. Bat Girl's fan fiction and your spring training posts are other good examples.

Yes, we recognize this. We just havent had any luck in figuring out a way around the software package for it.

When we write a story, it automatically creates a forum post and links the comments to the forum post. I wonder if we could do something like that for blog posts. (And then link the comments from the blog post to the article when it is promoted.) Sounds daunting, but that would be ideal

I agree Andrew. That was the intention, but we need to work on how to best implement it.

Keep ‘em coming gang. I can’t respond or read them all right now because I’m in the middle of setting up my in-laws new PC, but I’ll be back.

Tom, I can't find your previous post about with technical suggestions. I liked it a lot. And I agree about the SEO. It was a priority for us early, we set it aside, and it got a lot worse with this platform. If you have a chance to repost those ideas, I'd love to start organizing them.

"The I don't know what they'd be looking for" is an interesting point. Here is something that amazed me very early about this site. Occasionally, I have an enterprising young person who want to be a sports writer approach me about writing for Twins Daily. And I tell them they already can, and give them a sheet on how to write a blog and invite them to personally email me when they have written and I'll review their work and work with them on getting it good enough to promote. In the five years since we've had this site, I think that has happened at least 15 times. And I think, at most, one of them ever wrote for TD. Because I think what they wanted was someone to tell them what kind of story to write. And while I'm willing to do a little of that, I don't have time to do that full time. And that isn't really what we were trying to do here. What we wanted to do is give people who want to write about baseball or the Twins the place to find their audience. That is different than wanting to be a sports writer. But having a place where we gather ideas for stories, or where people ask for topics, might be an interesting place. I'm not sure the cleanest way to do it.

You bring up an ongoing problem, that I recognize, but haven't really figure out a way to handle well: management is lacking on the site. Sitting down as a writing community, reaching out to super-commenters, organizing an editorial board - these are management. I'm not saying the guys who started this can't do that, but it's not necessarily their passion. Nick organizes the handbook, Seth his prospect book, John events, but mostly these guys want to write. It might be that we need to give some thought on what expanding the "organization" - in both meanings of the word - around the site.

Two very good points here. Thank you.

Cory, you mentioned some things that I’ve been thinking about. I think we will do more with events, and I think we need to find someone to run them. I also like the idea of doing some serious research around making TD blogs more friendly to multi-media.

Thanks for the feedback so far. There are already some great suggestions here. One thing that is clear is that after we finish examining this as a community, I’ll make sure to publicly do a second piece, detailing some of the lessons and some steps we’ll work on.

The mission of Twins Daily is to gather a community of passionate readers around a core of independent, intelligent, and entertaining Twins writers. The community has been wildly successful on the first half but I don’t see much progress on the second half, and I’d like the community’s and our writers’ candid thoughts on how to get better. It’s not a small question; failure to address it could result in the eventual end of Twins Daily.We haven’t had the success we anticipated we could have in developing a large group of independent Twins writers. When we designed Twins Daily, we attempted to create an organic model for growth. Readers become commenters, and eventually they try writing, which they do on their blogs, and then we promote those to the front page. Then we started paying the writers the $2 per 1000 page views that the site makes off those stories. We want writers to write and we want them to get paid. And yet, our number of regular writers is slowly fading, without enough new voices to replace them. That’s because we’ve failed on the implementation in a number of ways. I’ll count off a few of them: Management and Feedback on the Blogs – Initially, I curated the blogs. That included promoting stories, as well as writing to authors, giving them critical feedback, encouraging them, etc. As I moved to the business side (and as we launched Vikings Journal and Wild Xtra), I moved away from that role. Twins Daily member “Kevin” has helped us quite a bit over the years, and I’m eternally grateful. We would have run into a crisis far earlier but for his hard work. But there is more that needs to be done. For the most part, that organic model has failed. Most of our regular writers were not developed organically; they are people that we (especially Seth) recruit. To grow it organically requires everyday curating and gardening. I know there are people who poured their hearts into quality posts on their blogs, only to never hear from us. That keeps me awake at night. I remember how that feels. Metrics and Payment - There isn’t much of a feedback loop as far as promoted stories go. At the end of each quarter, I send out the total page views to all the authors and send them money based on it. But they don’t know if the story they wrote last night did very well, or even roughly how much each story they wrote was worth. In addition, the $2 per 1000 page views isn’t enough. A first time writer might not get 1000 page views of their first story, and it’s rare for any story to rack up 10,000 views in its lifetime. And to wait until the end of the quarter for the money (or longer, depending on when I get to the books) makes the financial piece almost … apathetic? It feels like we do it because we feel it’s important that we pay, but I suspect the writers don’t make enough to feel it’s important that they receive it. Publicity and Focus – In general, we don’t really emphasize that we want to develop writers. I feel like most people view Twins Daily as Seth, Nick, Parker and John’s place to write. But that was not the intention, and that is not the reality. Every year, we publish about 1000 stories, and each year about half of them are from other writers. Plus, I think we would like that ratio to be far higher. This isn’t a trivial problem. Eventually, Seth, Nick or I will need to step away from TD, just like Parker has had to. If the community doesn’t solve this problem, it creates long-term uncertainty about the future of Twins Daily. (Indeed, I’d say it creates long term certainty that Twins Daily won’t last.) Plus, this is a good time to talk about this because we’re planning on what we’re doing to do for 2018 and this is a big part of our goals. I ask that you kick around thoughts and solutions in the comments. I hope you’ll be candid to the point of being brutal. There is nothing off the table as far as I am concerned. The solutions might be structural, technical, managerial, financial or something else. I’m especially interested to hear from those who have tried their hand at writing, but I don’t want to limit the conversation to that. I’ll start out with some questions to get people started: If you’ve written for Twins Daily, what was the experience like?How do we better manage and administer the recruitment and development of independent voices?What is a fair price to compensate our writers? Or the person who curates/tends/ manages our writers?How can we give feedback to our writers as a community? Or let them know just how popular their stories are?How can we get the word out that developing writers is a focus of Twins Daily? How would we restructure the site to emphasize that? (And do you agree it should be?)Would you like to hear more voices? How can we best do that?I hate to hit you all with a heavy topic in the week between Christmas or New Year's, but the end of one year and the beginning of another seems like a natural time for some reflection. Thank you very much for your participation. Click here to view the article

If you want, you can email me their names at john@bonnes.com. But they can also just ask for them under your name.

1) If you ordered tickets, you just need to show up with ID. We'll check you in. 2) Guests should be announced the first week January.