The 2008-2009 outlook for Old Gold & Blog

On Thursday I let you know there wasn't going to a be a live blog, and promised an explanation would come later, so here is that explanation.

Old Gold & Blog all of a sudden finds itself in a bit of a transitional period, and I’m going to use this post to explain to all of you what is happening. In the following paragraphs I’ll lay out a variety of information, but ultimately what they’re all going to add up to is this: Media relations has tightened their policies and Old Gold & Blog won’t be getting the same kind of access it has enjoyed for the last year. Live blogs, in particular, won’t be happening the same way.

To understand where we are, I need to explain where we’ve come from: I first began publishing Old Gold & Blog in late September 2007, explaining in my first post that I wanted to fill a void. I had a vision for what I thought the site could become, but I knew that the site was just as likely (if not more so) to fail completely as it was to meet that potential. Things were probably pretty touch and go those first couple months, but I stuck with it, my writing started to improve, and the site developed a small but strong base of readers.

At the beginning of the 2007-2008 basketball season, with the encouragement of a friend, I approached the athletic department about getting media credentials for basketball games. Wake’s athletic department hadn’t ever been presented with such a request, and was willing to test it out with me. Things went well and I received credentials to every game I requested them for throughout the season. I posted updates and analysis (a “live blog” if you will) at every media timeout (sometimes more often towards the end of halves), and interviewed coaches and players after the games for my post game stories. Readers seemed to enjoy the content the access provided.

There are lots of college fan blogs being published around the country, but very few of those do so with any kind of official access, they’re just fans posting from their living rooms. There are also a decent number of truly “professional” journalists working for local newspapers or national outlets whose job it is to attend games with press credentials and publish blogs (Dan Steinberg for the Washington Post and Heather Dinich for ESPN.com are good examples). I was in the unique position of having the access of a professional journalist while maintaining the independent status of your average fan blogger.

Back in the spring everything seemed to be going well. The media credentials allowed me to live blog from games and interview coaches and players afterwards for my post-game stories. The number of readers continued to grow and I was proud of what the site had become.

When spring football rolled around, I decided to head out to practice and tell people what I was seeing. I was amazed by the positive response from those posts, because I had not realized how starved for information fans were when it came to things like spring practices. The fact is, at a school like Wake Forest, there just isn’t a whole lot of coverage from traditional forms of media, and a site such as Old Gold & Blog seemed to step in nicely to fill that void. It seemed like a beneficial relationship for everyone; Wake Forest was getting more “media” coverage, and I had the fun, enjoyment, and a small stream of revenue from running the site.

I thought all of this was setting up for a pretty outstanding 2008-2009 athletic year, including continued access to football and basketball games (and really any other sport I wanted to cover, like soccer). I had some new software I wanted to use for the live blogs that were going to make them interactive and a lot of fun, and after a successful soccer experiment I couldn’t wait to try them out for football.

Media relations had different plans, however. They have tightened their credentialing guidelines to only include established media outlets, meaning that an independent website like mine is no longer allowed press box access to blog. Unless Old Gold & Blog were to become an established media outlet, or join an existing media outlet, there aren’t going to be any more credentials. Even if one of those things were to happen, there would likely be restrictions placed on live blogging.

I’ve loved doing live blogs from games. They’re fun and I know that readers enjoy them. This does not prevent me from sitting on the couch and live blogging, but it does keep me from doing it with a credential at a game. It’s unfortunate, but that’s the way it is. As much as I love live blogging for you (particularly with the new format that allows for so much more interaction between all of us), I’m not going to sit on my couch in the dorm to live blog when the actual game is happening in the stadium five minutes away – I just can’t miss out on that fun and I think you’ll understand. For road games I often will live blog from the couch, but just not for home games. I will, of course, continue to provide my post-game thoughts and analysis the same as always, except that it won’t contain any quotes from coaches or players since I won’t be in the locker room to get them.

Like I said, as much as I love live blogging, I’m going to go to the home games I can make it to, not sit on the couch and blog. I know, however, that there are many of you who aren’t able to make it to games and are doing exactly that – sitting on the couch at home. Many of you would probably even enjoy looking at and participating in a live blog while you watched. So here’s what I want to do: I want you to run the live blog yourself. It’s not overly difficult to do (I’ll teach you) and it’s a lot of fun. If you’re interested in giving this a try, send me an email and let me know. We can work on a schedule for the rest of the season, but for now all I need is a volunteer who knows he/she will be able to watch next Saturday’s Ole’ Miss game on TV in its entirety, will have a computer with internet access, and is willing and able to run the live blog. If this sounds like you, let me know and we’ll see what we can work out.

I don’t know how big of a change this will really end up being to the site, but there isn’t anything that can be done about it, so (to use the cliché) we’re going to make lemonade out of lemons.

I apologize for the length of this post, but I didn’t think it would really make sense without giving a larger picture for what that has happened. I’m curious to see what you all think about the whole situation, so let me know by leaving a comment.