The Mistaken Agenda

Wow - write anything on the topic of a blogger wanting media credentials and your email box fills up faster than a bathtub from a fire hose.

I've received every kind of response you could think of from the 'My best friend just lost his twenty-three year position with an established newspaper and your wanting to take his place?' type of email, to those that say 'Keep on pushing' types.

I had a couple of short conversations with journalists in the Baseball Writer's Association of America (BWAA) fraternity and both of them asked me the same basic question - why would you even want credentials?

My response seemed to shock them -- I didn't really want media credentials.

When I became a FidoNet mail carrier in the 80's, or helped stream the first live Internet broadcast of a state Supreme Court in the mid-90's when only NASA and CNN were doing live productions, or agreed to consult to an Attorney General's Office creating the nation's first Cyber Bill of Right's, I wasn't thinking of access or prestige.

Instead, I was thinking of the medium's historical significance with the goal of breaking down old-school barriers to the medium.

Citizen media holds that same historical significance.

At first I thought I would ask the BWAA to take the lead by asking them to consider creating a junior member status for serious bloggers. Non-voting, no rights, just association. You know - respect for the medium. Perhaps after being peer reviewed by local chapter members over a period of time, that blogger could one day become a regular member.

It was a way to mesh the two models together in the baseball world. And who knows, a few of the bloggers would probably have been culled from their junior rank to work for a few of the publications, much like MLB hires their freelance writers.

That idea is probably too forward thinking for some just like FidoNet was in the 80's that eventually led to email, or live streaming video in the 90's which led to, well, MLB's growth for one.

It's also untimely for others.

Howard Wasserman posted a nice commentary about my original post at the Sport's Law Blog and one of the comments he received said this in part:

"It's a very simple threshold issue. If you (newspaper, blog, magazine, radio station, etc.) can demonstrate you have an audience that tops whatever threshold is determined appropriate by the club/league, then you should be credentialed. If not, back to your mom's basement."

I disagree with this position. So, should new fangled sports networks like SBNation and MVN that have a few noteworthy blogs in their portfolio be credentialed because the community as a whole generates a lot of hits? I mean, is their audience driven to the content in the blogs, or the ease of chat communication in the network? Read some of the sites - that will be easy to determine.

Or how about a kiddie-blog that can generate 20,000 hits per day from one post Google picks up about free warez being available? And I bet you didn't know you could use proxy servers and a few scripts to generate massive amounts of unique site traffic.

It shouldn't be that simple.. it can't be that simple. It has to come down to professionalism first.

This issue has been around a couple of years and it is now peculating to the point that traditional media has to take notice as big money players like Apple and Amazon and others start getting into the act. They can't run and hide anymore.

Instead, players like the BWAA should adapt to not only protect the integrity of the game from the media perspective, to protect the clubs and players, but also to acknowledge citizen media is something that needs to be taken serious.

If they won't pick up the ball, someone else will leaving you to wonder where organizations like the BWAA will be 10 years down the road.

Maybe out like Flint?