Strange Bedfellows in New Media

The New York Times runs a story headlined "Tension over sports blogging," but far more of the article is devoted to the tension between the leagues and established, traditional media outlets over the use of pictures and video:

Tension over sports blogging is one of the strains between sports franchises, leagues and reporters to have emerged during the digital age.

The dispute has grown lately between the press and organized sports over issues like how reporters cover teams, who owns the rights to photographs, audio and video that journalists gather at sports events, and whether someone who writes only blogs should be given access to the locker room.
The explosion of new media, especially with regard to advertising income, has made competitors out of two traditional allies — news media and professional sports.

There's a bit of the standard "the trouble with bloggers" stuff at the end, but it's nothing major and nothing new. That's probably understandable because, Mark Cuban's recent hysterics aside, blogger-angst is something experienced by the media far more than it is by the sports leagues. Indeed, as the article points out, many teams have partnered with bloggers or, at the very least, have tried to engage them in a constructive way. For the most part, the anti-blogger hostility has come from the newspapers, which makes the article's attempted dichotomy -- the leagues vs. the media -- something of a false one.

The leagues have their problems with the newspapers, the newspapers have their problems with the blogs, and blogs -- generally a headless amalgamation of suckers like me on the make -- tend to side with whoever is willing to monetize them. Despite the allusions to battle lines being drawn, the whole scenario looks a lot more like Iraqi politics.

Where is this all heading? Hard to say. If anything, I could see the leagues bypassing the newspapers for media partnerships with blogs -- say, allowing a quasi-team-controlled blog to run a zillion game photos to the New York Times' "reasonable number" -- before I could see the newspapers siding with the bloggers against the sports leagues.

Could my view on that change? Sure. And whether it does all depends on whether ESPN or MLB.com makes the more attractive offer to purchase ShysterBall . . .

(Link via ShysterBall reader Grady Snyder)