The NCAA this week announced a formal program limiting how often bloggers with media credentials can update their blog while attending championship college events.
The sports governing body set blogging limits for each sport. For example, those at football games can update their blogs three times per quarter and once at halftime. For basketball, bloggers can post five times per half, once at halftime and twice per overtime period.
The policy even sets rules for water polo (three per quarter, once at halftime), bowling (10 blog posts per session) and fencing (10 per session).
The move is already garnering the predicted outrage. It reminds me of the music industry trying to hold on desperately to old business models in a fundamentally new era.
This isn't the first time the NCAA has butted heads with the blogosphere. In June, a sportswriter from the Louisville, Ky. Courier-Journal was ejected from a college baseball game for, you guessed it, blogging. Indeed, I'm sure there are folks at the NCAA that see its latest efforts as a reasoned compromise, but I think it just shows how out of touch they are.
If I were the NCAA and there was someone passionate enough to deliver a blow-by-blow account of a college fencing match, I'd want to encourage that, maybe even buy them a non-alcoholic beer.
For those who want to check out the guidelines for themselves, the rules are posted in a PDF file on the NCAA's Web site.
- prev
- 1
- next
