Patrick O’Keefe

Tim Arango at The New York Times has an article on the tension between sports bloggers and the teams and leagues they cover. I laughed when I read this:

The limits of coverage is a hot issue in athletics at the college level as well. The National Collegiate Athletic Association issued new guidelines this year: in women’s water polo, bloggers are allowed three posts a quarter and one at halftime; in fencing or bowling, 10 posts are allowed for each day or session.

With absolutely no disrespect meant toward these sports or the people who play them (I enjoy bowling), are collegiate women’s water polo, fencing and bowling so popular that they should discourage interest in their sport in such a way? I mean, how many people seriously and closely blog about women’s water polo as compared to, say, the New York Yankees baseball team. If I’m in charge of those things and people are actually interested in them, I say “heck yeah!” Those sports should be doing whatever they can to maintain as much interest as is humanly possible.

Of course, this ignores the obvious absurdity of the rule in not understanding blogging. You can edit a blog post. Tha is what a live blog is, usually. Updating the same post.

They don’t have huge fan bases, at least not compared to other sports and someone blogging about them is almost certainly a fan. Why would you do that?

Via Ben.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 10:43 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.