Fitzpatrick campaign overview

You may have come here looking for information on the NHL all-star game balloting or about Rory Fitzpatrick from a search engine search, an ad on http://www.voteforrory.com, or a link on a message board post or a Facebook or MySpace Rory group. Welcome!

I’ve tried to put together a blog with comprehensive coverage of the Rory Fitzpatrick campaign. As of the release of week 6 voting results, Rory was in third place among Western Conference defensemen!

Media and blog coverage

Coverage of the Rory campaign has mushroomed. From November 20-January 9, I’ve catalogued with direct links 105 stories and links to audio and video coverage of the phenomenon, and 245 blog posts.

Technorati has generated a neat updating graph that shows blog posts that mention Rory Fitzpatrick for the last 60 days.

and that mention the NHL All-Star game in the last 60 days.

The HF Boards

The campaign jumpstarted on November 19 with a thread started by Sabres fan Steve Schmid on HFBoards. By January 9 there were 13 discussion threads with a total of 11,442 posts and 352,776 views. Another good Rory discussion thread is at the official Canucks.com message board, which as of January 8 had 1,757 posts and 57,940 views.

VoteForRory.com

Steve Schmid’s website VoteForRory has great links on the left side of his page to YouTube videos, and the Facebook and MySpace groups devoted to the campaign. Check it out. By the end of voting on January 2, the site had received over 339,000 hits, and had climbed over 361,000 hits by January 9.

Facebook and MySpace

As of January 2, 2007, a Facebook.com campaign group with 4,576 members and a MySpace.com group with 727 members were actively supporting the Rory campaign.

Rory on YouTube

 As of January 31, there were 31 different Rory Fitzpatrick videos up at YouTube, the most famous being two satirical attack ads posted december 10, one focused on Nicklas Lidstrom and viewed 42,407 times, and the other focused on Scott Niedermeyer and viewed 45,303 times.

Why this blog?

I started this blog on November 10 as part of a project for a graduate school journalism class on “Writing for Digital Media” My initial plan was to cover the Carolina Hurricanes all-star game nominees. I averaged 40-60 hits per day on the blog. I did my first post on Rory on November 27, and quickly realized that Rory Fitzpatrick was going to be the #1 story in the runup to the 2007 NHL all-star game in Dallas. My peak traffic so far has been 1,137 daily hits on December 21. As part of a marketing phase of the class project, I placed an ad at VoteForRory, making a donation to the Canucks for Kids fund in return for the ad placement. I’ve been getting between 100 and 250 hits a day to this blog from that ad.