Baseball blogging ban: dumb, dumb, dumb
My reaction to the recent news that a newspaper blogger was ejected from a baseball game for live-blogging the event can be summed up in one word: moronic. Yes, I know that the league is well within its rights to throw the reporter out, since it is part of the agreement that newspapers (and other media) sign that they won’t do real-time game coverage. And my friend Mike Masnick at Techdirt may be right when he says it’s not a First Amendment issue. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s stupid, however. Is the league going to confiscate BlackBerrys and cellphones so that no one blogs from the stands now?
As Seamus McCauley says, baseball needs to enter the 21st century at some point, and now is as good a time as any. Dan Gillmor says that newspapers should hire fans to blog for them. There’s some discussion of the ban in the comments on the banned reporter’s blog, and former sports editor Joe Gisondi has a thoughtful post on the whole issue over on his blog.
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(On Jun 12th, 2007 at 11:09 am)
I agree that the NCAA ought to permit live reporting of games — and probably will eventually.
But if they don’t change their policy, then the newspaper (or another media organization in a similar situation) seems to have only two options:
1. They can play ball (yeah, pun intended) with the league and hold the reports until after the game, or
2. They can defy the league by having their reporter live blog the games while watching them on TV or listening to the radio. That would mean tearing up the press accreditation and probably forgoing not just access to the press box but all other access to the team. No more passes to the dressing rooms, the team bus, or the closed training sessions. No photographers allowed at games. No more tip-offs to reporters. That’s a big problem for a newspaper, so option 1 starts to look a lot more palatable, unless the paper is convinced that the teams need its coverage as much as it needs their cooperation.