E-Media Tidbits

NCAAsports.com NCAA recently booted from the pressbox a newspaper reporter who was live blogging a championship game.

Brian Bennett reminds me of a lot of the hyper-busy sports writers I know these days. He's 33, has written for the Louisville Courier-Journal for about eight years, and he really loves beat reporting. He also works cross-platform, writing traditional stories for the paper (repurposed online) and reporting in real time on his blog. Most recently, he has been covering the University of Louisville baseball team, which has advanced to the NCAA Men's College World Series beginning Friday in Omaha.

Bennett gained some unwanted notoriety Sunday when the NCAA tossed him out of the pressbox for blogging in manner they deemed inconsistent with their credentialing policy.

Bennett won't be at the MCWS -- he has a long-standing vacation planned -- but the Courier-Journal has been issued two credentials. Will they blog? And if they do, what will the NCAA do?

The Courier-Journal is clearly pressing the issue, which they believe violates the First Amendment. "It's clearly a First Amendment issue," Courier-Journal executive editor Bennie L. Ivory said in his own newspaper. "This is part of the evolution of how we present the news to our readers. It's what we did during the Orange Bowl. It's what we did during the NCAA basketball tournament. It's what we do."

It's what a lot of newspapers do -- despite NCAA policy that exists to protect the rights of its television (in this case ESPN) and radio partners. The International Olympic Committee has been particularly vigilant in defending broadcast rights; the PGA does not allow reporters to bring computers onto the golf course; and NHL's approach varies.

As long as the current policies and approaches exist among sports leagues and organizations, sports writers who accept credentials should play by the rules. A closer look at Bennett's blog clearly demonstrates that he was providing play-by-play coverage at the express instruction of his editors. As Ivory says, "It's what we do."

However, organized sports should understand that the game has changed. As the Baltimore Sun's Peter Schmuck writes, "Ejecting newspaper reporters from college baseball pressboxes seems pretty extreme, especially when you consider that about 95 percent of college baseball programs are begging for any type of media coverage."

So what to do?

I agree with Beau Dure, who contributes to USA Today's Sports Scope blog, and Off-Wing Opinion's Eric McErlain that it's time to sit down and reconsider these outdated policies.

Dure recently wrote: "The argument is this: Anyone can sit in front of a television and do this, so why not a sports writer from the pressbox? ...This certainly goes beyond one guy at the College World Series. It's time for all the parties involved to sit down and determine what bloggers can and cannot do. I hope they will allow bloggers to do live coverage because bloggers can be descriptive in ways that play-by-play like CSTV's Gametracker cannot. Bloggers can make it worth the NCAA or NHL's while by providing links to the official league site and the broadcast information. I don't think anyone is trying to make money at ESPN or anyone else's expense. Blogs can give people insight they otherwise would not have."

Sports Scope, which is almost a year old, provides what Dure calls "surveillance of sports news and opinion on the Web. It is more objective in content and looser in tone than the newspaper. It's not overt opinion, but we specialize in digging up opinions that perhaps challenge the conventional wisdom." To date, USA Today has not blogged from live sports venues.

As blogs, podcasts and, ultimately, vidcasts increasingly become a part of basic news coverage for all forms of media, the lines that differentiate print and broadcast will become less obvious because of their convergence on the online platform. Maybe we'll look back and laugh about this someday.

Dan Gilmor of the Center for Citizen Media is already laughing: "The paper should go much further. For one thing, it should go around the control freaks and buy a ticket for a reporter and have him/her blog the game from the stands. Then it should get the readers/fans involved. For example, the paper should ask readers to blog the game themselves, from TV sets or from the stands, or both -- and then point to the best reader game blogs."

In other words, maybe it's time for journalists to leave the pressbox.