NFL/ESPN Agree Not To Tweet Draft Picks Early, Because Apparently No Other Sports Journalists Exist

from the mega-fail dept

Professional sports leagues in general tend to have some degree of desire in controlling information. Some attempts at control are more sensible than others, however. For instance, taking down streams of the Super Bowl? I get it. It's still stupid, and I don't agree with their logic, but I understand the basis for their logic. Forcing any non-broadcast partners and advertisers to euphamize the biggest spectacle in sports? Well that's just dumb. There's no logic behind that at all. So you see, there's something of a degree or scale to which these control attempts fall.

Well, there was anyway, until the NFL broke the scale with a move so myopic and full of fail that it's difficult to imagine it was made by anyone other than a collection of rocks with a history of rock-head trauma. I'm talking about the NFL clamping down for this year's NFL draft on journalists tweeting out the draft picks before they are announced by Commissioner Roger Goodell on stage. For the majority of you who probably didn't watch the first round of the draft on Thursday, the NFL went as far as to purposefully not show live footage they had of draftees talking on the phone with the team picking them, so as not to tip anyone off that they'd been drafted. Even more fun, the on-screen talent went out of their way to remind you over and over and over again that they were withholding information so that you wouldn't know until the moment they wanted you to know. The gentlemen's agreement the NFL has with ESPN, and obviously their edict to NFL Network reporters, meant you also wouldn't find out any tipped draft information on Twitter.

That is, of course, unless you follow any sports journalist not affiliated with those two entities. What the NFL seems to have forgotten is that the NFL Network and ESPN aren't the only people reporting on the draft and that their desires are meaningless to reporters over which they have no leverage. One example of such a reporter, and in my opinion he's one of the best follows for NFL news, is CBS's Jason La Canfora. He wasn't having anything to do with the lockdown.

He intends to tweet as much as possible. Beware: that includes upcoming picks before they are revealed on TV (if he gets them) to his nearly 300,000 followers. He also will be contributing updates to CBSSports.com.

"We're not a broadcast partner for the draft," La Canfora said. "I will be trying to get the information out as quickly and accurately as possible. What event is made more for Twitter than the NFL draft? If the teams have the information; if the guys in the production truck have the information; if the commissioner has the information; why wouldn't passionate football fans want it as well?"

In round 1 of the draft, La Canfora did exactly as he promised. If you were watching the NFL draft to find out who picked who, you got that information somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes later than La Canfora's 300k followers. No, that time difference isn't a big deal. No, I'm not saying the NFL can't run their business however they choose. But if you're going to force certain broadcasters to lock up information that is available elsewhere, and brag about it no less, all you're telling me is that the place I should be going to for NFL news isn't the NFL or ESPN.

Filed Under: social media, sports journalism
Companies: espn, nfl

Baseball Writers' Ivory Tower Eroding

from the going-going-not-gone dept

As newspapers like the Rocky Mountain News shutter operations, we hear more and more stories about the supposed looming end of journalism. The latest story, from the Wall Street Journal, fortells the doom of baseball writers, one of the oldest and most powerful sportswriting press corps in the country, in an article melodramatically titled Baseball Writers Brace for the End. The Baseball Writers Association of America seems to be buckling down and preparing for the "dark clouds" that they apparently see on the horizon. However, for an organization that only recently admitted web-only reporters into its membership, it makes sense that they see the changing journalistic environment brought on by the web as something bad rather than a new opportunity. Yes, it's expensive to send reporters on the road with teams, and yes, in these tough times, some papers are cutting their sportswriting staffs. That said, just because newspapers are cutting sportswriters, that does not mean that sportswriting itself will die. Like investigative journalism, sportswriting can certainly adapt to an online environment.

After all, it's not the paper that makes the content better, it's the content itself. Case in point, Yankee beat reporter Pete Abraham's blog is religiously read by hordes of Yankee fans. If, for some reason, The Journal News were to shut down, surely Pete would be able to find an audience to support him on his own. Granted, the Yankees would have to have the foresight to continue to give him press credentials. That said, large market teams like the Yankees and Red Sox are not likely to be the first victims to lose their writers. However, even in small markets, the MLB franchises themselves benefit immensely from well-written articles about their organizations. Mark Cuban pointed out last year that it is in the best interest of sports teams to keep the local coverage of their teams alive, since without it, their fans lose a vital connection to their teams. Cuban goes so far as to suggest that the teams form a "beatwriter co-operative" to fund coverage of their teams. Journalism purists may scoff at such a notion, fearing that funded reporters become merely corporate shills. But, in this era of growing transparency, anyone with a computer can easily point out if an emperor wears no clothes, so any reporter, whether on the MLB payroll or not, would think twice before squandering their hard-earned reputation on a questionable story.

That said, the costs of covering a baseball team should be plummeting. Baseball bloggers do a fine job of covering games by watching them on TV. Want an inside perspective on the game? More and more players are getting on twitter. Heck, sabermetric analysis of baseball games, popularized by Moneyball, does not even require that you ever go to a game (although, you're missing a lot if you don't). So, yes, even you can be a baseball writer, and perhaps that is what the BBWAA is really scared of.

Filed Under: baseball, journalism, sports journalism