RUNNING THE FLOOR: BLOGus

Last night, as with every other night the IU basketball team has played, we intrepid Indiana Daily Student folk teamed up with friends at HoosierNation.com, the Herald-Times and InsideTheHall.com to live blog/live chat the IU-Wake Forest basketball game with interested fans.

Early in the second half, officials at Lawrence Joel Coliseum told anyone involved on that end that they were limited in the number of updates they could post per half because International Sports Properties had multimedia rights – radio, online gametracker – to the game.

The NCAA has a rule regarding the use of live blogging at championship events, but this was no championship, obviously. According to Wake Forest officials, it was their duty to protect ISP’s multimedia rights, and our live blog fell afoul of that, since everyone there had already posted more than four times that half. Citing an ACC rule, of which no one could produce a physical copy, they disallowed further blogging from press row.

Those of us watching from home drove on.

Now, what threat, praytell, does a live blog that really resembles more of a chat pose to “America’s Home for College Sports,” as ISP calls itself? I will cut off my left hand if there were more than five people whose eyes we stole from ISP.

Those of you familiar with our basketball coverage at the IDS surely know about our Basketblog, the medium through which we ran our little corner of last night’s activity. We’re quite proud of the blog, but let’s face it, we’re just a college newspaper. We don’t bring down the roof with this thing.

ISP has, by my count on its Web site, 45 partner schools, including the big three in Georgia (UGA, Tech and State), both Miamis (Ohio and Fla.), six SEC schools, seven ACC schools and Notre Dame. Their impressive, massive network includes upwards of 900 radio stations and more than 100 TV outlets.

Is the Basketblog – or Inside the Hall, or the Hoosier Scoop, or Hoosier Nation – so much a threat that one of the most recognizable brands in college sports wants to regulate it? Is any blog? Any Web site at all?

Nobody is really sure exactly what a blog is, where it fits among established media, and that causes problems.

Most newspapers have all kinds of blogs now for topics ranging from sports to politics to entertainment.

Hell, my father writes a weekly blog about my old hometown, since it just became a city a few years back. Does this blog threaten to destroy neighborhood associations and newsletters all over Sandy Springs, Ga.?

That’s the problem – no one knows.

No one is really sure what a blog is, much less what it can be. I can post text, audio, video, pictures and even, it would seem, live chats in the Basketblog. So is it print media? Is it visual media? What is its major competition?

The reasons this is a problem are manifold: Who are we competing against for ad revenue, the driving financial force behind all media today? What is our viewing audience (and how do we even find that out)? Are there really people out there more interested in reading what we have to say about the IU-Wake Forest game instead of following it themselves?

I don’t know.

But I do know this: The NCAA, the ACC and every other major conference in college athletics works night and day to protect its broadcasting partners, whether they be of TV, radio, gametracker, what have you. Entities like ESPN, CBS and, yes, ISP pay out millions – if not billions – of dollars every year for the privilege of owning exclusive “rights” for whatever programming they bought.

Blogs threaten this wonderland because they can, in many different ways, diffuse the same basic information (let’s call it “news”), often at the same speed, without paying a dime.

Kids these days.

My point is this: Writing a fat check might give you the rights to telecasts, images and reproductions of a broadcast, but it does not give you exclusivity of the news. The Hoosiers shot 37.7 percent from the field Wednesday night; ISP does not have sole ownership of that. It is news; it is public and no amount of money, no contract, no regulation – written or otherwise – can change that.

Surely there has to be a better way for all parties to coexist. Instead of practicing reactionary tactics and just running scared from any and all things new, perhaps we ought to take an honest look at the changing face of our profession as one unified community, not piecemeal and with only our own interests in mind.

I’ll order the pizza, we can chat at my place.