Saturday, November 20, 1999Bengals caught Web-less
Only major-league team without its own site
BY TOM GROESCHEN
The Cincinnati EnquirerThe Bengals suffered yet another public relations disaster Friday, and this one was national in scope.
The Wall Street Journal took the NFL's worst team (1-9) to task, noting that the Bengals are the only pro football team without a Web site. The headline of the story, on the cover of the paper's "B' (second) section, read, “Cincinnati Bengals Prove to be Toothless on Field and on Web.”
In fact, the Journal said, the Bengals are the only one of the 118 major U.S. pro football, baseball, hockey, and basketball teams absent from cyberspace.
Jeff Berding, Bengals director of community affairs, said the story did not give the full picture. Berding said there is a Cincinnatibengals.com Web site run by the NFL via NFL.com, and that the team frequently sends updates to the site such as rosters, depth charts, and press releases.
Berding also said that for three years, the team has been “actively involved” in the development and maintenance of several Web sites, notably paulbrownstadium.com and cincinnatisfirstfans.com, two team-related sites that deal with the new stadium. Those two sites eventually will merge into one team site, he said.
Berding said the team has planned its own football-only site, and that it could have started this season. But the team believed it would be appropriate to bring its Web site online in conjunction with the opening of the new stadium next year, and that site could be up as early as April.
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