After watching The Beatles: A Hard Day's Night I came up with several constraints that would not allow a sports information blog about athletes. These constraints would not only effect the amount of content that would be allowed on the site, but it would also sensor it too much to have the blog seem real enough for fans to enjoy or media to trust as a source of possible story ideas.
Contraints:
1. You can't talk about or show anything that revolves around alcohol, sex, drugs, or anything illegal. While this seems like a no-brainer. The alcohol is the most important that would be missed. The schools that we deal with all know that the athletes drink, but you would have to make sure that there was no reference to it and especially to underaged drinking. The media would love this stuff and grasp on and not let up until something happened to the athletes. Just look at the local example of the mayor of Duluth getting arrested for Drunk Driving in Wisconsin. This story has been front page news since sunday (that is four days now). If a normal citizen had been involved it wouldn't have even made the news. This just goes to show how much the media like to crusify public figures.
2. You are not allowed to talk about new recruits in Division II sports. Division I sports have lifted the rules saying that you can only mention a new recruit once, as long as they are not the only topic in the story, but Division II has not. This is all about the contraints of the NCAA and this leads into the next constraint.
3. The NCAA would want the final say about what could and could not go up if it had anything to do with the staff of the university. So if you wanted to have the sports information person be the editor the NCAA would eventually become involved and set more and more constraints about what could go up. But if the school did not have any involvement in the process it could be totaly uncensored by the athlete, but that would defeat the purpose of trying to create more media and fan attention for the school.
This is just the begining of what I'm sure would become a full and drawn out process of review and rules placed on a blog written by or about athletes at a university. It just adds to my idea that a sports information blog, while interesting, would not be a good idea to write because of all the contraints.
Posted by laje0007 at December 14, 2005 11:27 AM