Mark Cuban, who is known for being on the forefront of social media, shocked some this week by imposing a new blogging policy in his locker room. It's worth a read. He takes some shots at newspaper blogs, and marks a pretty solid defense for his policy. This does bring up some interesting issues for our group. For example...
1. Do we offer the same interviews, press releases, etc., to blog owners?
2. Related to Cuban's locker room situation, what is our policy if an army of bloggers want to be present at a news conference? Do blog writers from established media institutions get preference?(Cuban says no.)
Cuban's Blog: http://tiny.cc/iGAin
Wikinomics Blog: http://tiny.cc/nZgjO
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
If bloggers are gathering news with true journalistic intent, they should be treated as would any other recognized journalist. If total requests from all journalists becomes unmanageable, then I could envision making changes that apply to interaction with all journalists.
Despite Cuban's good intentions, he is discriminating against journalists who publish only on blogs; I'd be surprised if prohibiting all bloggers isn't just a temporary fix until he comes up with a better way to provide access to bloggers.
I think there's an elephant in the room -- and it's not whether information on blogs is inherently higher or lower quality than any other published information (although it is related). Do we trust our audience to evaluate the quality and reliability of information sources?
I think our biggest mistake in school PR is continuing to refer to stakeholders as our "audience" instead of what they really are...our "community." An audience is talked to, a community is where school districts can have conversations. The relationships are key. If blog writers are in the district community, it would be wise to converse with them or run the risk of being outside the conversation.
Post a Comment