Guidelines For Issuing Press Credentials To Bloggers

I agree with most of your points. I think a three-day window is OK for the initial request, so they have time to evaluate the outlet, but subsequent requests should only be a day for the reasons stated. I don't think the site needs to be commercial though. It might take a long time to get people to buy ads, or maybe the outlet doesn't want to sell ads. If they don't need to, fine.

I agree that the PR guy can find the link himself. It might be polite to send a link once in a while, but shouldn't be required. Totally agree that access should be the same as everyone else. The blogger might ask a good question that no one else thought of and advance the thinking in the room. I think a fresh perspective is great and being defensive isn't the way forward.

 

I think a website with 13K page views a day and a 10K circulation paper are extremely different -- and it's the 13,000 website that has more clout. For one thing the subject matter is much more narrow so you know the people going there are interested and actually reading (they aren't flipping past to get to the wedding announcments, etc). They also made the decision each day to go there, rather than once a year when they subscribed. These very interested, active readers are more likely to be the "mavens", people who influence what other people think about the team. Teams would be stupid not to court these outlets.

 

That wasn't the point of the original question. My challenge was to the idea that somehow a website with 13K views was going to hold ESPN meaningfully accountable. Or was going to provide "oversight" as regards national columnists and their serial failings.

And frankly, I'm not just challenging the idea that an entity so small, no matter how targeted or active the eyeballs may be, can sustain that kind of role; but rather that the watchdog role itself is the sole province of blogging. There's a certain arrogance in the assumption that only blogs can remain disinterested commenters on the failings of the mainstream media.

 

Understood. My point was more of a tangent from yours, though hopefully leading back to the original question of credentials. I should have made that more clear.

 

As to the credentialing issue, I think the website in our example, 13K page views a day, creates another problem. One that I brought up earlier in the thread, but which is newly meaningful in light of your last post.

How many 10K papers were applying to our pro franchise for passes in the past in the original example? Let's say it's a fair-sized metro area ringed with suburbs. Two major dailies, and let's say 10 (too many, perhaps, but works for our example) regional dailies and weeklies. That's +/- 12 applications the PR staff has to sort through to assign some number of seats in the press box, and/or passes to the locker room. Set aside for the moment all the other media.

In the new model of the new atomized media, how many blog applications are going to arrive now? Just 10? 50? 500?

I understand the idea of applying some criteria to sort through them all, but I still think that the sheer number of applications is going to be huge. And that the sorting process itself is going to be fantastically problematic; especially if there has to be a PowerPoint presentation on the relative qualitative value of certain kinds of readers/viewers/surfers versus others every time someone seeks a seat.

 

Page views aren't the same as printed copies of a newspaper. they're in the same ballpark but neither is a true indicator of how many individuals are reading content.

 

Which takes us right back to position one. By what criteria are bloggers to be considered when applying for credentials?

 

Would registered users be more accurate than page views? If the registration process limits one user per email address, it would help.

In any case, page views are like circ numbers in that both are more than the actual number of readers each is supposed to represent.

 

I think the numbers are going to be shockingly low. A high percentage of bloggers are going to take not going into the locker room as a point of pride -- their selling point is that they are typical fans giving their analysis (the Bill Simmons theory of blogging). They don't want to be considered journalists. I doubt you will find Deadspin in any press box. And there are quite a few for whom blogging is a hobby and they have a job and kids and wouldn't have time to cover games if they wanted to.

And how many big-time blogs are there covering most teams? No more than 5 for most teams (obviously it varies -- the Yankees are going to have more than the Royals). To me, the issue won't be that PR directors are going to be drowning in a sea of applications. The issue will be who gets seats when they are scarce. If you are the Twins and you have one seat left to cover a key weekend series, do you give it to a 10K circ paper in Northern Minn or Aaron Gleeman?

As far as sending links to the PR director, I don't think it needs to be mandatory, but that the policy should state that the blogger must provide links in a timely fashion if the team requests to see them.