Had a great time today doing an interview about The King’s Game on KKMS 980 AM radio’s “Live! With Jeff & Lee” program this afternoon. Click here to listen to an MP3 sound clip of the interview. Thanks again to Jeff & Lee for a fun afternoon of baseball talk!

The Twin Cities media has really picked up on THE KING’S GAME. In a 10 day span I was on KTIS radio, KFAN radio, WCCO radio and had stories in the Woodbury Bulletin and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The Star Tribune newspaper article is the photo at right; click on it to enlarge the photo and read the story. Writer Judd Zulgad did a great job.

If you put this guy in….

Then this happens…

Had a great time today on KFAN-AM sports talk radio’s “Bumper to Bumper with Dan Barreiro” show, one of the most highly-rated drive-time talk radio shows in the Twin Cities. I was on to talk about The King’s Game, self-publishing and dogs. The sound clip of my interview is below.

http://mlblogsthekingsgame.files.wordpress.com/2006/06/radio1.jpgmy_weblog/files/KFAN2.mp3

A wild, fun day promoting The King’s Game to the media. It began with an early-morning radio interview live in studio with KTIS-FM (98.5) about The King’s Game. The appearance was to promote a giveaway the station is doing with the book and highlight some signings coming up on Friday and Saturday.
Later on in the afternoon I had a photo shoot and interview for a newspaper regarding the book. I sold half a dozen copies of The King’s Game in the first hour after the radio interview, and got more than 70 hits today on my web site. Man the power of the press! So much thanks to KTIS and the great people there and especially the great message of love and hope shared on its airwaves every day.

The sound clip is below, and let me know if you have any questions or problems playing with it.

http://mlblogsthekingsgame.files.wordpress.com/2006/06/radio3.jpgmy_weblog/files/ktis.mp3

Another reason to love MLBlogs! In part the publicity I got here helped me set up a signing and a giveaway with a Christian radio station (KTIS-FM, 98.5) that has more than 350,000 listeners. The station, KTIS, is giving away more than two dozen copies of The King’s Game as part of a Father’s Day contest where listeners can nominate “Deserving Dads.” Along with The King’s Game the winning dads get a gift certificate to Gander Mountain, an outdoors outfitter.
I am so pumped – this is my first ever book signing. I’ll be getting interviewed live on the station on the morning of June 13. I’ll try and plug the MLBlogosphere if I get the chance! If anybody is in the Twin Cities area the weekend of June 16-17 stop by and I’ll give you a hefty discount off of the book’s cover price if you mention MLBlogs!

For any of you college bloggers and journalism students out there: If you are a college junior, senior or grad student you can apply for Pulliam Fellowship, which is essentially a 10-week paid internship at two of the bigger newspapers in the country, the Arizona Republic and the Indianapolis Star. I applied and got accepted into the 1997 class and it jump-started my journalism career big-time. One of my first stories there was covering a Jesse Jackson event that turned into a national controversy. It’s in my book Full Contact Trivial Pursuit, Plinko & Dogs: 47 Essays on the Laughter of Life. What makes it all the more amazing was I was just a 21-year-old college student at the time! The Pulliam Fellowship not only lets you be a real reporter at a real newspaper and cover real stories, they bring in all kinds of national speakers, introduce you to the Associated Press folks, teach you lessons you could never learn in a classroom, and more. The list of former Pulliam Fellows makes up a who’s-who in today’s print journalism world.
So go for it! My favorite part of the experience was the head of my journalism department at the Unviersity of St. Thomas in Minnesota telling me, “Don’t bother applying, they’d never take somebody like you from a smaller school like this. It’s more for the kids from Harvard, USC, ASU.” And he was right – the students in my class were from Stanford, USC, Harvard, George Washington, Texas and … St. Thomas? My fellow Fellows probably thought I was flying in from the Virgin Islands.

I’m living proof the Pulliam Fellowship folks give every applicant a fair shake.

FYI, there was a nice story recently in The Bergen Record out in New Jersey about the MLBlogosphere. Props to reporter Aditi Kinkhabwala for a well-reported piece. It’s a good look at the baseball blogging “industry,” as it were, and where it might be headed. Good stuff!

Special thanks goes out to Bob Sansevere at the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper for featuring this blog and The King’s Game in his Page 2 “Moments” column. Sansevere is part of what I’m noticing is an increasing trend by sports sections to address more “off-beat” type stuff on Page 2, like Q&As with athletes, Twins’ Manager Ron Gardenhire’s favorite jokes that are printable in a family newspaper, etc.

Bob took my e-stalking of him quite well and I’m grateful for the item in today’s (5-27-06) paper. I also sent along the nice mock-up MLBlogosphere’s wizards did using my photo and the book’s cover art and the paper used it, which was awesome. Props to you guys and I hope the story gets more of my fellow Min-ne-soh-tans signing up and blogging about the Twins or whatever else.