Baseball blogging ban: dumb, dumb, dumb

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Posted by Mathew @ 9:23 am on June 12 2007 | |

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.

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Mathew posted this article under Blogs, Media on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 9:23 am. . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, and you can also view Technorati Linkbacks or check for other responses using YackTrack.

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Ed Kohler 1 year ago 1 point
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I've live blogged sporting events I've been at, and if I was asked to leave I simply wouldn't come back. I'm not interested in participating in events I can't talk about when and how I want to.

Of course, I'm doing this as a fan rather than as a paid reporter when it comes to sporting events. In the case of true reporters, I don't see what's lost. More coverage, and more interesting coverage builds team loyalty.

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http://www.technologyevangelist.com

Chris Clarke 1 year ago 1 point
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The NCAA are unbelievably backwards in many respects, and this is one of them. This is one rule that needs to be abolished- once that's done, I have about a thousand other suggestions...

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http://studentpr.com/blog