The War Against Live Blogging
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?
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There are always two sides to every story.
Perhaps the bloggers are competing with TV and RADIO where tons of needed revenue comes from. So much is invested in those resources, they must be protective.
Can anyone honestly deny that being in their shoes, they might be forced to make those same restrictions.
What about tweeting? Now that we have #hashtags to cover events like this, what's not to prevent them (or anyone for that matter, home or in person) from tweeting out 100's of live coverage or "hyper-instant" tweets?
We, hashtags.org are looking into doing some "live update" stuff so that folks can watch the stuff come in directly over a tagged source. We want to have sub-second latency, but that's seeming to be an unrealistic goal. Maybe sub-5 second reporting is attainable.
It's certainly an interesting time we live in where the old world media is trying to keep control of the flow of information in a world where anyone can tell the world anything in a matter of seconds.
I for one can't wait for the time when the walls start to crumble. Viva la people's digital information revolution.
I like to be a blogger in my country.
It is ridiculous to say that bloggers are competing with tv and radio! I cant imagine someone who would prefer to read blogs to be informed of the game, rather than watch it on tv or listen to it on the radio.
of course if you're prevented to utilize radio or tv, but are somehow able to read blogs - this would be a much helpful way to stay attached, but how much will this hurt the copyright holders?
and copyright holders of what, for Hogfather's sake? next we'll have to pay for the air we breathe...(i hope that no Corp lobbyist is reading this and taking notes =/
This is pretty ridiculous. Live blogging doesn't really compete with anything. No one's going to decide not to watch the big game on Sunday because they can sit at their computer and read about it on a blog instead. The people reading live blogs are doing so because that's the only way they can experience the game. People either read live blogs, or they miss the game entirely. This is more of a case of "we can't make money off of this, so we don't want anyone else to, either."
It's been my dream for a long time to take out the NCAA if I ever became a billionaire. This just adds one more thing to my list of reasons why.
Oh dear. You can always spot folks who have no idea about blog-land. They always seem to refer to "posts" as "blogs".
Clearly the NCAA are putting limits on the number of blogs you can start during a game.
(That's about right, as a college football quarter takes about as long as the blogger sign up process...)
Sheesh. The information wants to be free, right?
This bodes badly for blind sports fans who rely on their mates to relay events for them!
My vote goes to Charlie for the best comment so far on this issue. :-)
very interesting.
i'm adding in RSS Reader
Of course it is all about money. I couldn't watch much of the NCAA basketball tournament in March, but I could follow the live feeds on ESPN. It isn't any different, but I'm sure ESPN doesn't want the "competition" from bloggers.
Seriously, who comes up with the numbers for these blogging regulations? If the old farts at the NCAA had been around to make rules when newspapers first starting coverage sports, do you think they would have imposed a regulation on newspaper coverage like 800 words/75 sentences in articles? The shortsightedness is absolutely ridiculous.