June 11, 2007
Blogger Booted From NCAA Baseball Press Box
By now, many of you may already have read the story about how a reporter from the Louisville Courier-Journal was ejected from the press box yesterday when he attempted to live blog an NCAA regional baseball playoff game:
"A Courier-Journal sports reporter had his media credential revoked and was ordered to leave the press box during the NCAA baseball super-regional yesterday because of what the NCAA alleged was a violation of its policies prohibiting live Internet updates from its championship events."
After spending a season in the press box covering the Washington Capitals, and having spent about a quarter of a season in the press box at RFK Stadium covering D.C. United, I think it's safe to say I have something of a unique take on this issue which I wrote about over at the AOL Fanhouse today.
One thing that bothers me about how this story is being reported concerns the angle of "bloggers rights" -- an angle that I'm obviously sympathetic to. Unfortunately, there's a whole lot more going on here than just the rights of one blogger, it also has something to do with a complex web of business relationships that aren't going to be so easy to untangle.
For instance, in a world where everybody has access to an instant publishing platform, what sorts of protections can a broadcast rights holder reasonably expect? While there is some pre-exisiting case law here, I'd be pretty chary to speculate about how it affects the situation we saw yesterday.
So before we go off and condemn the NCAA or any other organization facing these same sort of questions, I think bloggers as a group have a responsibility to do more than just condemn, but rather to explain in a clear and cogent manner exactly what we want to do and how to go about it.
UPDATE: Some late word from long-time reader, Beau Dure:
It took three weeks of back-and-forth on the phone to get permission to do this from the pressbox:
http://members.cox.net/bdure/resume/final.htm
This was in 1997.
You’re right that bloggers/reporters aren’t owed some constitutional right to give play-by-play from the pressbox, though you could also argue that it’s the only way to stay competitive with every non-credentialed blog that can live-blog through a TV set. The trouble is, as you guessed, the NCAA. When it comes to bureaucracies that move slowly and insist they’re doing the right thing, the NCAA is worse than the feds.
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05:26 PM