So is this essentially the final nail in the coffin for any relationship BGWFans had or attempted to have with the park?
It's not a big deal at all. It's just BGW marketing playing more of their typical, petty, playground-tier games.
There has been zero communication between BGW and BGWFans since early 2020 when the park randomly decided to reblacklist us out of the blue and refused to give us any explanation or information re: why. This was after they suddenly called BGWFans out
publicly on Twitter as "Fake News"
for public records reporting. It's hard to get less "Fake News" than "here are documents provided by BGW to a government agency."
Marketing leadership turned over substantially in the lead-up to that period—our ex-journalist allies left and one of the
new marketing people who cycled in had a long, proud history of BGWFans animosity so... yeah. It's not totally surprising the department returned their their old ways when all the mavericks moved to greener pastures, but I was (and remain) shocked at just how grossly unprofessional the handling of the change in direction was. You don't have to like what your predecessors did or didn't do, but when you assume a leadership position and want to make changes, it's your job to responsibly and professionally change course. Going a different direction is fine, but how you decide to go about that is everything. Suddenly, publicly lashing out at an outlet that did great work (BGW's words, not mine) with your predecessors and then rejecting any attempts at further communication is just, frankly, immensely juvenile.
Fortunately, individuals inside the park and even, at times, other departments in the park have found this communication embargo to be absurd and/or directly harmful to the park's/their department's objectives. I'll let you guess what happens then.
Maybe one day a new maverick or two will enter BGW marketing and the tides will change again—but for now, it seems to be business as usual over there since pre-COVID. There are MANY places where the interests of our readers and BGW's business objectives align completely—areas where we have previously done and could continue to do really good work together. It just requires marketing leadership who can swallow their pride and realize that they can't actually, feasibly control the flow of every last tidbit of information about and/or out of the park
and that's okay. Corporations in many other industries make the same calculus every day. Seriously, think about other topical areas in journalism. Tech? Entertainment? Presumably sports? Politics? These are ultra-leak-y areas where everyone involved fully acknowledges that journalists doing their jobs throughout the rest of the week shouldn't actually prevent them from working with organizations and corporations when their interests do align.