Tension Over Sports Blogging

Last month, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban sought to ban bloggers from the team's locker room, but the National Basketball Association intervened, ruling that bloggers from credentialed news organizations must be admitted. Cuban then decided to let in any blogger — “someone on Blogspot who has been posting for a couple weeks, kids blogging for their middle school Web site or those that work for big companies.” Tension over sports blogging is one of the strains between sports franchises, leagues and reporters to have emerged during the digital age. The dispute has grown lately between the press and organized sports over issues like how reporters cover teams, who owns the rights to photographs, audio and video that journalists gather at sports events, and whether someone who writes only blogs should be given access to the locker room. The explosion of new media, especially with regard to advertising income, has made competitors out of two traditional allies — news media and professional sports. At the heart of the issue, which people on both sides alternately describe as a commercial dispute and a First Amendment fight, is a simple question: Who owns sports coverage?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/business/media/21bloggers.html?ref=tod...
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