NCAA attempts to hold back new media tide

UPDATE: Joe Gisondi dissects this episode in depth at On Sports.

Here’s a story that crosses all boundaries: sports, blogging, newspapers, and new media. The NCAA kicked a Louisville Courier-Journal sports writer out of a super-regionals baseball game because he was blogging during the game. Here’s the Courier-Journal’s side of the story: Courier-Journal reporter ejected from U of L game.

This is idiotic on so many levels that it’s incredible that the NCAA would stoop to such stupidity. Wait, strike that. But it’s also something that you college media advisers and journalists need to be aware of, at least until some judge somewhere rights this agregious wrong. If your students are live-blogging an NCAA event, keep an eye on the door and your press pass.

Related coverage: TechDirt and Center for Citizen Media, which offers a unique way to circumvent this idiotic rule.

Update: Here is a link to some PDFs of the NCAA’s undoubtedly arcane, overly-bureaucratic press credential rules that doubtless spell out how press can’t “live” report from an event because of “rights” that they’ve sold to some major media corporation. (hat tip to Mike Black for the pointer - I hope this is the page he was talking about).

One such document says:

“Real-time transmission of streaming video, digital images, real-time audio, including play-by-play and statistics, of any game of the championship is exclusive to the NCAA’s web site and/or any other web site designated by the NCAA and its rightsholders. “Real-time” is defined as “live, continuous play-by-play or description of an event.”

But I’m highly suspect of the definition of “real-time” in terms of live-blogging an event.

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