At Iowa coach Kirk Ferentz’s news conference, school officials gave reporters a copy of the NCAA Blogging Policy. This policy limits credentialed reporters at football and basketball games to five blog entries per half, one at half-time and two during an overtime period.  Reporters may mention both the score and the time remaining, but compose nothing that could be construed as play-by-play.

This policy mitigates earlier draconian edicts, which stopped reporters from blogging at all during NCAA baseball or allowed reporters to blog, but not about game action.

This policy should be understood tactically.  It’s an attempt to stop live-blogging, and that only. College sports, particularly football and men’s basketball, are a business.  The NCAA and the universities get their grubby little palms greased for all sorts of broadcasting rights (television, radio, text message, etc.). They have no fingers in the live-blogging pot, and they view the practice, if it provides play-by-play, as a form of broadcasting that may keep you, internet fiend, from patronizing other NCAA approved venues.

The sticky wicket for the NCAA, from a legal perspective, is that blogging is, in actuality, reporting, not broadcasting.  It may be far more timely and efficient, but it’s reporting.  Because of the first amendment, the NCAA can’t copyright a newsworthy event.  The NCAA can control the right to broadcast audio and visual representations of a touchdown. However, they can’t prevent someone from reporting the fact that the touchdown occurred.

Protecting broadcasting revenue may be an admirable goal, but it hardly justifies enacting an arbitrary censorship regime in violation of the First Amendment.

NCAA lawyers will huff and they will puff, until a news outlet with some stones decides to blow their house down.  Like most NCAA activities, the policy is shortsighted, stupid and a complete waste of time, since anyone outside of the press box can write the same live-blog with impunity.

Maybe the NCAA should devote its energy to more worthy endeavors, such as sending someone besides Mr. Magoo to investigate the whole Reggie Bush thing?

NCAA, Newspapers Draw Blogging Battle Lines (The Wiz of Odds)