Louisville Courier-Journal v. NCAA

The difference between golf, and the prior week when Louisville played at Mizzou, and many of the other examples cited, is that ESPN has the rights to televise every super regional game. Those rights don't extend to the regionals. Does anyone televise the golf championships (maybe The Golf Channel)? As for regular-season college football, that's controlled by the home team, not the NCAA.

 

The NCAA does not own the broadcast rights to any Division I-A college football game. The schools and conferences do. So the NCAA cannot directly tell you anything. The school can threaten to revoke your credential if you blog live play-by-play from the game site.

The NCAA does own the rights to the post-season tournaments it runs, such as the baseball tournament. And thus it can revoke credentials, and probably threaten not to credential outlets that violate its policy. It would not make it impossible to cover, for example, the CWS. Players are available in the parking lot as they head to their busses. But it would make it considerably more difficult.

And the NCAA does not make billions off of college football, since there is no I-A playoff. Many of the member schools do make a bundle, tho.

 

Exactly my thought reading the comments. I also enjoyed the ones that said "Why didn't you just go across the street to the bar and watch on TV and continue your reporting?"

People have no idea what we do.

 

I see that column has a digg on it. I haven't registered for that site yet but I'm about to. We should try to use our combined forces for good here to raise as much stink as possible.

 

Further bullshit:

The "credential agreement" (which no one signed or was asked to, but it was circulated with the credential package at the certain Super Regional I staffed) was vague in its wording and allowed for a liberal interpretation therein.

The memo circulated to Louisville reporters, of which Bennett posted an excerpt, was much more black-and-white. It said you couldn't blog, no ifs, no ands, no buts.

Looks like Indianapolis stiffened its own rules in the middle of the game...

 

The person who said that had a great idea of what Bennett was doing. He was posting play-by-play results of Saturday's game on the blog. There was absolutely no reporting being done for which he needed to be in the press box. So the fact that he was thrown out of the press box should not have prevented him from providing the same quality of reporting. Everything in the blog could have been written from watching the game on TV. So if Bennett went across the street to the bar and continued posting (provided they had wireless), he would have provided the exact same info. Hell, in THREE different posts he is commenting about what ESPN is showing! He also could have found a spot in the stands and maybe found a wireless connection and posted. Or he could even have phoned into the paper and had someone post his comments for him.

All of this is a separate issue from whether the NCAA should be allowed to throw him out of the press box. But he certainly could have posted every single word that he did post if he were only watching the game on TV at a bar with a wireless connection.

 

Truthfully, you could still blog that way, if you were only a blogger. So there is no way the NCAA can stop this kind of thing from happening.

But of course newspaper reporters would be blogging as just part of their duties so being banished to the bar across the street might be nice, it's not going to improve your game story.

 

OK, I was digg No. 2. Let's try to make a concerted effort to push that higher.

 

If being in the press box is adding absolutely nothing to your story or your blog, as in this case, then there's really no reason to be in the press box. So being kicked out of the press box should not matter. And if the blog was an important enough product, then you should find an alternate way of producing it. You can take up the fight with the NCAA later.

As far as the game story, reporters will leave the press box to interview the people involved in the game. If in this case, Bennett had found an alternate way to watch the game while continuing his blog, then returned to the locker room and interviewed people, he could have wrote the same game story he wrote had he watched the entire game from the press box.

 

I doubt the NCAA folk would have let him back in to the media interview area.

Or are you suggesting he interview players/coaches outside of that area, by their cars? I'm not clear...

 

I am guessing the intent wasn't to get around the ban on blogging from the press box. I bet the intent was that the C-J wasn't going to allow the NCAA to restrict its right to publish when it wants to.

 

Obviously schools can blog all they want:

http://tarheelblue.cstv.com/blog/