NCAA representatives ejected a reporter from a college baseball game for blogging on Sunday. According to the story, it is against NCAA policy to provide live updates from an event.
The article didn’t explain why the NCAA has this rule, but we were speculating here in the Sentinel newsroom that it probably has something to do with broadcast contracts restricting the right to provide instant information to whatever TV station is showing the game.
The editor of the paper that the reporter worked for is saying that this is a First Amendment issue and the paper may take legal action against the NCAA. I’m interested to see where this goes. Yes, it is the reporter’s right to provide information about a public event, but it is also the NCAA’s product, so I can see why they would want to control when and how information about it is reported.
I think the NCAA will eventually have to give in on this and allow blogging from games, because if anything, blogs are complimentary material to TV. I don’t know anybody who would choose to read 5-minute updates over watching the game. Running blogs are useful because experts can provide instant analysis and feedback without interrupting the broadcast. ESPN and its TrueHoop blog have done an excellent job of this during the NBA Finals. If anything, the running commentary has been more entertaining the the actual game.
If the NCAA really can’t stand watch people knowing what is happening in college sports without it making money off of it, one solution be to offer mandatory advertisements that must be run in any blog a reporter is doing for an NCAA event.
Anyways, why wouldn’t the NCAA want as much exposure as it could get for college baseball? I can’t blame people for wanting to read what was happening instead of having to hear the ping of those metal bats.
