MLN Newswire – www.mlntherawfeed.com – 08.13.09 – As part of the 10th anniversary celebration of MLN Sports, the publishers announced today that SZ, the first digital sports magazine on the Internet in 2000, will get a new domain name, effective today: MLNSports.com"SZ is our flagship magazine," said MLN Sports senior editor Brian Ross. "We’ve run with the domain name minorleaguenews.com since the company’s inception, but as we also embrace coverage of alternative pro sports like Arena Football, which is projected to come back, Major League Lacrosse, and developmental auto racing, we felt that there is nothing ‘minor’ about any of the clubs or leagues involved, as they compete with ‘major’ leagues. MLN Sports defines our broader mission: To serve the 94 million people who watch sports other than MLB, NFL, NHL or the NBA, or NCAA."The first "cover" of a digital magazine on the Internet was MLN’s April, 2001 issue. The whole publication was laid out in a magazine-style format.SZ (MLN Sports Zone) began its publishing life as Minor League News in 2000. By 2001, computers had improved enough, and Internet access speeds had jumped to a blazing 56k, allowing for the publication of the first digital "cover" to replace the magazine’s old index page.This was the first time in the history of the web that a professional publication had gone to a paper-feel format, abandoning the cluttered home page of traditional websites."We wanted to make a statement," says Ross. "In the 1950s, television was always trying to outshine Broadway, legitimate theater. Everyone used to go around and use the word ‘website’ like it was something cheap, something less than you would get from a print magazine. We wanted to provide the look and feel of a great print magazine, with the reach, the searching power, the depth, and the green-friendly lack of paper that the Internet provide."Today, SZ is the only independent e-magazine publisher of original features on minor league, developmental, and alternative professional sports news, and still the only fully magazine-format digital publication on the web."We’ve made some changes over the years," noted Ross. "We switched the covers from a vertical format like paper to a horizontal format. Computer screens went wide to meet the TV world. We joined in."The July 2009 Cover features Tommy Hanson of the Atlanta Braves, the No. 1 player in MLN Sports’ annual MLN FAB50 Baseball rankings. These movement and talent rankings have consistently beaten other, older rankings for player impact on clubs and accuracy.The publication also grew in physical size."The pictures that we used to publish when the digital superhigway was a two lane rickety 56K road are like postage stamps to what we put out now," joked Ross.SZ now publishes 14" wide photographs and even digital posters that can fill a big screen TV hooked up to the Internet."People like big images when they pick up an ESPN – The Magazine or an SI. What SI does for the majors, SZ does for the minors. We recognized that folks liked paper for a lot of reasons, but we can provide the key ones, size, feel, professional design, and provide so much more than a magazine sitting in a bin or a rack."
Now, with four publications, including MLN – The Raw Feed, the first newswire exclusive to the minors back in 2003, the MAJOR BLOGS of Minor League News, the first sports critics dedicated to the minors, and the Open Source Sports Directory which lets fans catalog their favorite players, MLN Sports is atop the massive wave of millions of people who have moved to smaller communities with their businesses over the last decade. They, and the locals who have lived in small town America and Canada, have flocked to new ballparks and arenas to see professional sports in their home towns, generating more than 40 million new turns at the turnstiles across North America in the last decade.
