As someone who's in the preliminary stages of doctoral dissertation that will in part be focused on the contributions that fans give to the sports entertainment complex via blogging and fan produced websites and as someone who teaches about the role of social media technologies in a constantly changing world of information dissemination, this insightful and thought provoking piece by Tim Carmody for the Nieman Journalism Lab is highly encouraging. The juxtaposition between ex-AOL exec and current SBNation CEO Jim Bankoff's ideas for creating profit by selling to a tech and sports savvy demographic and Dan Shanoff's likening of the new sports journalism landscape as a technologically enabled second golden age full of boundary pushing artists is indicative of arguments about the internet's impact on a variety of practices. Wonderful new place to find new markets or wonderful new place that allows for new artistic expressions? Of course, these two things, while we still live in a society organized around the logic of capital, are not mutually exclusive and are interconnected in deeply structural ways.
I'm particularly interested in Carmody's important point about Dallas Mavericks owner and tech billionaire Mark Cuban's recent comments about denying press passes to web journalists:
Now, slamming bloggers (or reporters, period) for trafficking in headline-grabbing gossip is old hat. More significant is Cuban’s argument that between the organization’s PR machine, players’ use of social media, and amateur blogs, sports teams can communicate just as well with their audience, and fans’ desire for information can be just as satisfied, without the need for professional journalists as intermediaries. It’s a provocative claim, but also a signal that sophisticated writing about sports is being produced for digital media by many different organizations with very different interests.
There's a lot to be said about Cuban's stance here. I agree with Carmody that it means that good stuff is being written by a variety of different people with different understandings of how that writing should be utilized and what it means to be a writer/journalist/amateur/fan/PR person. But, I think it should be pointed out that Cuban is very nearly explicitly pointing out that the only the only point of journalism is to benefit his brand, and he'd rather have a group of highly controlled individuals (his PR people and his players) and unpaid fans do that. Again, not all that new of an idea, but I think the reliance on content produced by people who the organization itself doesn't have to respect or fear (ie. the amateur fan bloggers) is something new. Part of what intrigues me the most about the effect of the internet on journalism is this kind of thinking. Cuban seems to be taking fan blogging for granted here, but I suppose if all your concerned about is building interest (negative or positive) in your franchise then it doesn't really matter what the fans say about you.
Shout out to the almighty Sam Han for alerting me to this article.