In the hockey world, a face-off between bloggers and old media

As traditional media outlets scale back coverage of the NHL, at least one professional team is courting – and helping pay for – coverage by fans with laptops. Will the old guard toss their reporters' fedoras back into the ring?

By Gare Joyce | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the November 16, 2007 edition

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Many sports fans have long believed that anyone could be a sportswriter – that anyone could sit up on press row, forgo cheering, and type up a few deep thoughts and pithy observations about the games professional athletes play.

These days in Washington, D.C., that widespread belief is being put to a test. To many sportswriters, it's a scandal. To the owner of the Washington Capitals, it's the future.

Press-box seats that had been reserved for newspapermen in seasons gone by are being assigned to bloggers. A reporter from the Washington Post might find himself sitting between the gentlemen from On Frozen Blog (www.onfrozenblog.com) and Puckhead's Thoughts (http://pheadsthoughts.blogspot.com/).

That chill in the air isn't just the Verizon Center's air conditioning turned up on high.

"There are some [newspaper reporters] who regard it as fans being given too much freedom and intruding on what has up until now been a very exclusive club," says Rebecca Henschel, who launched her blog, A View from the Cheap Seats (http://dccheapseats.blogspot.com/), at the start of last season. "It seems to be a bit of a generational thing, actually. Younger reporters are maybe more willing to put up with it than people who have been in the business for 20 or 30 years."

Thus do old-media curmudgeons lurk where you'd expect. It's enough to make them throw in their fedoras.

A new type of press corps

The Capitals bloggers haven't squeezed out sportswriters who have covered the National Hockey League. "I went down to Washington in April to get a sense of what was happening in the press box," Toronto-based hockey blogger James Mirtle says. "It was deserted, even with a handful of bloggers in the box."

But neither have the Capitals just opened the press-box door to anyone with a laptop and an opinion.

Last spring, after his team was eliminated – again – from the NHL playoffs, owner Ted Leonsis hoped that the major newspapers and other media outlets might dispatch reporters to Moscow to cover the Washington stars playing for their national teams at the world championships. Wishful thinking. Mr. Leonsis, who bought the franchise in 1999, knew how tough it was to get coverage of the team even though it was playing around the corner – The Washington Post, The Washington Times, and all other outlets focus on the Redskins, the Wizards, the Senators, and all manner of college sport. They decided to give the world championships a pass.

Leonsis wasn't deterred. Just as his love of the Capitals seems unconditional, so, too, does his faith in the power of the Internet. After all, he has held a number of high executive positions with AOL over the years.

Leonsis covered the expenses of four bloggers, two from On Frozen Blog and a pair of Caps staffers, to attend the event in Russia. Afterward, Leonsis declared the experiment an unqualified success – that the reported $40,000 he spent on his crew of bloggers gave him more bang for his buck than taking out space in the Post.

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