NCAA Women's Basketball Final Four Credential Process: Bloggers at home this weekend

This morning, I had the distinct pleasure of speaking with two of the finest  WomenTalkSports.com basketball contributors, Q McCall of Swishappeal and Cheryl from Hoopfeed. The conversation is found here: 

NCAA Women's Basketball Final Four Credential Process: Bl...

Women Talk Sports Podcasts

The reason we spoke today is because we all have one thing in common right now: we're at home and we'd rather be at the NCAA Women's Basketball Championship in San Antonio. 

This call, which is approximately 35 minutes in length, talks about some of the struggles we've experienced over the past year in getting access to the NCAA women's basketball games so we can cover them, and goes in depth about reasons why we have these struggles. 

We touched on the following subjects: 

• Both NCAA employees, top-level college coaches, and many traditional journalists are supportive of the work that WomenTalkSports, Hoopfeed and Swishappeal do throughout the year to cover the sport with dedication.
• Some colleges/conferences have been good about granting credentials throughout the regular season. Some have not.
• The following metrics for credentials to the Final Four are arbitrary/silly, and prevent bloggers from helping the sport of women's basketball: 1) you must cover 90% of games during the season, and 2) you must have over 1 million unique visitors per month (that's the level of traffic that only major media outlets can achieve).
• Setting a metric like 1 million unique visitors per month does guarantee the "maximum number of eyeballs," but it does NOT guarantee that they are the RIGHT eyeballs: those of women's basketball fans. The blogs have very niche followings from dedicated readers who comment and contribute regularly. 
• Some (not all) traditional reporters who get access to the games don't even care about what's going on (Cheryl experienced one writer watching football during a game). This should be something that's vetted during any credentialing process. Invite those that actually care. 
• The relationship between journalists and bloggers should be dynamic and the two should support and feed off of each other. There should be no subversive level of competition. Journalists should look to bloggers as sources of information, and bloggers should feed off of the excellent work that journalists do. 
• Any possible worry of ethical issues with bloggers (in terms of fact-checking or otherwise) is unrealistic. Many bloggers have journalistic backgrounds and "go the extra mile" to make sure they publish stories that are factually correct. If they're not correct, our communities are quick to let us know. Not to mention, many newspapers and AP stories are factually incorrect all the time. 
• The NCAA women's basketball committee should reconsider their Final Four credentialing process next year. 

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• 2010 NCAA Hoops Championship

There are 4 comments on this post. Join the discussion!

sassesue

You forgot They're Playing Basketball: http://hoopism.blogspot.com

Sunday, April 4, 2010 at 12:48pm PDT

hoopfeed

Sue, your blog is another great resource for women's basketball fans, especially for California prep coverage. I've learned a great deal from you about high school teams on the West Coast and college teams in Southern California. I'm glad you commented! :)

Sunday, April 4, 2010 at 1:19pm PDT

C and R

You go, bloggers! You make some salient points about a %u201Cblog site%u201D vs. a traditional %u201Cjournalistic%u201D site. Some of the bias is outdated and based on old print media models (which is funny because the print model is dying quickly, replaced by%u2026 the internet and bloggers). The NY Times website gets the required 1 million unique visitors per month, yet pay little attention to women%u2019s basketball, whereas a site like swish appeal is ALL about women%u2019s basketball. Women%u2019s basketball sites do not generally get the attention male sports get, so they won%u2019t get the one million number (yet). Why would a business pass up free publicity to the very fans you are trying to attract?

Oh, one thing, Megan, in your intro you said, %u201CI had the distinct pleasure of speaking with two of the finest WTS basketball contributors.%u201D Um, little embarrassed here, but that makes the rest of us basketball bloggers feel second rate (C and R%u2014from the fans point of view). Perhaps next time you could have used a different qualifying statement, such as %u201Ctwo of our many outstanding basketball contributors%u2026%u201D

With a slightly (okay, greatly) bruised ego, C and R

Monday, April 5, 2010 at 9:28pm PDT

C and R

sorry the quotation marks in C and R's comments got formatted in a funky way!

%u201C = "

C and R Again

Monday, April 5, 2010 at 9:30pm PDT