Last June, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) ejected a credentialed reporter from a baseball game because he was live blogging the event for his paper’s web site. The reporter was stripped of his press credential and barred from the press box. His lawyer called out the NCAA for its draconian policy prohibiting live blogging, writing, “Once a player hits a home run, that’s a fact. It’s on TV. Everybody sees it. [The NCAA] can’t copyright that fact. The blog wasn’t a simulcast or a recreation of the game. It was an analysis.”
The NCAA responded two weeks ago by releasing a new policy for live blogging of collegiate sporting events (PDF).
The policy provides for limited blogging by credentialed bloggers only. I.e., American football bloggers get a maximum of 3 posts per quarter, and 1 at halftime. For baseball, it’s once per inning, for golf — 10 per day. Bloggers are also required to submit their coverage to the NCAA’s Blog Central directory and to include the NCAA logo and link on their posts.
TechDirt’s Mike Masnick points out that the NCAA’s rules apply only to credentialed reporters — and the NCAA can’t do anything about publications who just buy their reporters a ticket (except maybe make it harder to stay connected and blog at the venue level). Worse, concludes Masnick, is that the NCAA policy is really hurting fans.
“What’s really idiotic, though, is that this makes no sense. Limiting live blogging only hurts the sport. The people who follow live blogs are the really passionate fans — the ones who love the game the most. They follow the live blogs not as a substitute for watching the game on TV or attending in person — but because they cannot view the games that way and/or they want to feel the camaraderie of discussing the event with other passionate fans. Cutting off the ability of a reporter to feed info to these fans simply makes no sense. It’s hurting your most passionate fans for no good reason whatsoever.” — Mike Masnick, TechDirt
The NCAA policy is also vague, specifying the number of “blogs” that a credentialed reporter can make during a given competition. It doesn’t define what a blog is, however. Does that mean single posts, or updates to posts? This Daily Eastern News blog post from November chronicles live the first quarter of a Southern Illinois University football game. It was sanctioned by the NCAA and I count 12 updates in the single first quarter post. Would that now violate the new NCAA policy? In a quarter of football, where they could easily be 60 or 70 plays, is 3 posts enough to keep readers interested?
Guardian writer Jemina Kiss notes today that the NCAA isn’t the only one getting rough with live bloggers. The International Cricket Council is considering banning sites provide live blog coverage of cricket matches without paying for coverage rights.
To me this feels a lot like the RIAA’s war against music downloading. A stodgy old regulation authority is confronted with a new technology, and because it can’t figure out how to control it or make money from it, it tries desperately to limit its use.
What the NCAA doesn’t seem to realize is how helpful live bloggers are at promoting collegiate athletics to their most passionate fans. As Mike Masnick astutely observed, the people who conduct and read live blogs are generally the people who are most obsessed with a particular team or sport (who else could stand to watch an entire sporting event unfold in a painfully delayed stream of text updates?). Rather than limit these people, the NCAA and ICC and other organizations should work to make it easier for them to live blog — especially since they are promoting the league product free of charge.
Further, like the proliferation of music downloading, there will be no stopping the spread of live news coverage. The NCAA and ICC may be able to stop credentialed reporters from live blogging events, but they can never stop ordinary fans from Twittering game results as they happen (something I am sure we will see people doing more of in 2008). Jemina Kiss predicts, “real-time text coverage is a relatively new format so no doubt it will be a decade before the rights framework catches up.” In that decade, how much unnecessary pain will bloggers have to endure because of institutions that just don’t get it?
