Saturday, December 22, 2007

NCAA Blogging Policy

Now that the NCAA has solved that pressing North Dakota logo issue, it looks like they've moved on to other, extremely important ventures. After a bizarre incident where a newspaper writer was kicked out of an NCAA baseball super-regional for live-blogging, the NCAA has come out with a live-blogging policy. (Link via this guy)

So credentialed journalists can now live blog during NCAA championship events(which in hockey, only applies to NCAA regionals and the Frozen Four), but are limited in the number of the posts. In hockey, bloggers are allowed three posts per period, plus one in between each period. So if someone is live-blogging after each goal from the press box at the Frozen Four this spring, and someone jumps out to a quick 3-0 lead in the first period, and then an asteroid hits the Pepsi Center, the NCAA kindly requests that you wait until the intermission to blog about it.

The NCAA is all about coming up with solutions. As long as that solution involves bureaucracy and pages upon pages of rules.

3 comments:

AdamW said...

Wow. Thanks for pointing that out Chris. It's something we'll all need to know. ... I remember back in 1996 when we were all just starting USCHO, and the NCAA was banning on-line only entities from covering NCAA events. Now, the hockey people were kind to us, because they knew they needed coverage no matter where it was coming from. But the NCAA as a whole was being ridiculous, and I wrote them a long letter suggesting that the *medium* by which news was being delivered is irrelevant, and will become moreso in the future. Rather, they should give out credentials to news media sources that are trying to do a credible job - and we gave a list of criteria for what that meant. For example, any knucklehead could print up a 4-page "magazine" and say they're journalists trying to cover the Frozen Four -- and some did do that. Why should they get a credential and an on-line organization doesn't? Anyway, though I'm sure my letter had nothing to do with it, they quickly changed their tune.

Likewise, this policy is pretty silly -- although at least they are allowing it to some degree. Maybe it couldn't hurt the quality of some of the blogs out there if they were forced to limit themselves to 3 posts per period :)

-Adam W. (CHN)

Anonymous said...

Less government= better government

Matt Wellens said...

This policy is just ... wow.

Any easy way around the "three posts per period" rule would be just to update the one post. The policy actually fails to mention how many times a post can be updated.

I want to know when the NCAA will start cracking down on those score updates threads on USCHO.