10pm, for many of you, that means flicking onto BBC or ITV, and watching the evening news. But not for me.
10pm means turning over to channel 417 on Sky so that I can catch up with the latest news in the format of ‘Around the Horn’ and ‘Pardon the Interuption’. Sporting Bliss for me.
But last night, they started to discuss Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, an outrageous character, who truely supports his team and is a talking quote machine.
Now, early this season, Cuban spoke-out against bloggers trying to get close to his team, claiming that they didn’t have the skills to be able to make comments about his team.
However, he has now changed his tune, and will be allowing any blogger into the players dressing room so that they had talk to the players.
As you can imagine, this has been met with a wide and varied reaction in America.
Below is the Around the Horn view of ‘bloggers’, containing the views of Jay, Woody and Tim.
http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/video/videopage?&brand=null&videoId=3338505&n8pe6c=2
Compared those views to them of Mike and Tony on PTI (you will have to let the video play for a while, before they get to the blogging discussion).
http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/video/videopage?&brand=null&videoId=3318417&n8pe6c=3
Tell me what you think about this and I will reply.
I personally think that this coach/manager doesn’t know himself what he wants and neither does the press. As journalists we constantly harp on about freedom of speach, access to information and the right to report. However when we feel that our proffession is being undermined by people we deem as un-educated and unfit to report we suddenly decide that we do not believe in these ideals. Instead only ‘real’ journalists should be allowed into the locker room. This is wrong, everybody should be allowed to speak to the players in a controlled environment (press conference etc). ‘real’ journalists will still retain their audience and not be affected if they are as good as they should be.
Plus imagine how fantastic it would be as a journalism student to be given access to Manchester United or Saracens, you couldn’t buy that kind of experience.
By: jameswedwards on April 5, 2008
at 12:21 am