{"id":27,"date":"2007-06-13T19:31:57","date_gmt":"2007-06-13T23:31:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=27"},"modified":"2007-06-13T19:31:57","modified_gmt":"2007-06-13T23:31:57","slug":"go-islanders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/13\/go-islanders\/","title":{"rendered":"Go Islanders."},"content":{"rendered":"

Not that I’m any kind of hockey fan – the NHL ceased to exist for me when the owners lied about how much money they were making and the players bought it – but I have to give credit to the Islanders for making some attempt to bring bloggers into the arena on a wider scale<\/a> without marginalizing the mainstream sports media. The sports blogosphere is a mixed bag; it’s full of bad writing and uninformed analysis, but at the same time, it’s capable of the sort of narrowcasting that the MSM can’t handle, it’s got a real-time no-bull ethos that the MSM definitely can’t handle, and it has the potential to be incredibly fun … and we know that the MSM looks down on fun.<\/p>\n

But what I also find interesting is the strategic value of this move. Credentialing bloggers, even on a limited, separate-but-equal basis, is a way of co-opting them. Bloggers tend to revel in their excluded nature; they are not part of the mainstream, and often the teams\/leagues won’t even acknowledge them (putting them in company with Al Jazeera<\/a>!), et cetera, giving them a rebel’s cachet that I think is a huge part of their appeal. But access will almost certainly blunt some of that edge; when you meet a player, for example, it’s a lot harder to tear him to shreds for his on-field (-ice, -court) incompetence. It’ll be interesting to see if criticism of the Islanders from credentialed blogs starts to fade, or at least soften, or if we start to see a divide between credentialed and uncredentialed blogs. Does taking a credential mean you’ve sold out? And will this pay off for the Islanders in improved coverage, or at least reduced criticism? I’m betting this wasn’t as ad hoc<\/i> a decision as the Isles’ PR guy would like us to believe – that it is, in fact, part of a strategy to bring bloggers into the fold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not that I’m any kind of hockey fan – the NHL ceased to exist for me when the owners lied about how much money they were making and the players bought it – but I have to give credit to the Islanders for making some attempt to bring bloggers into the arena on a wider […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}