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. Eric Rice says people should live-blog every NCAA event in protest.