Alternately, “Give us press passes!” Steve Rubel points to a movement led by DenverSportsZone, a consortium of Rocky Mountain sports bloggers, to convince Major League Baseball that granting individual franchises the power to assign press credentials at their discretion is a good idea.
Base-blogger Gabe Stein jump-started the MLB Fair Press initiative when he was rebuffed in his attempts to get major league access to the Colorado Rockies, who informed him that MLB only allows teams to credential websites that are “affiliated with a major national news distribution source” – your basic ESPN.com, for instance.
Mainstream sports writers are reportedly mocking the idea in online hangouts – one reason might be the biting criticism Stein levels at sports columnists – but Rubel rightly points out that goals of the movement are “reasonable,” merely calling for an “evaluative process…that allows legitimate blogs to bypass the blanket website ban,” if teams are game. Stein notes that Major League Soccer and the National Hockey League have reached out to bloggers and met with mutual success.
Rubel suggests small-step measures as an opening compromise, such as those embraced by the Democrats for their relatively blogger-friendly 2004 convention. MLB has complained in the past about revenue shortfalls; it would be wise of them to consider that many of their most passionate fans are devoted blog readers, and that playing nice with the most popular bloggers could lead to potentially lucrative opportunities for the big leagues. And as Rubel says, sports “are not exempt from the force of 37 million bloggers.”
