I'll digress a bit from my usual Avscentric posting for a brief post about blogging and the press. Yes, it's still possible to beat a dead horse. You just have to flip it over.
Over at the regularly-excellent chick hockey blog Interchangeable Parts (I'll forgive them for being Devils fans), they've been interviewing assorted bloggers (all female) and one of the questions has to do with the unending debate over granting press-level access to us lowly bloggers.
One of my favorite responses was from "Katebits," who writes the blog The Willful Caboose. She writes:
I would never ever want to mask my fandom, which seems to be a requirement if you want to sit in the press box. So, I guess the answer is that I don’t care about press access at all. To be quite frank, I don’t see sports as a topic which requires traditional objectivity in very many circumstances. This isn’t politics we are talking about. It’s sports. The entire concept of sports is that we are fans. The illusion that anyone is devoid of team loyalty seems like a pretty shoddy platform in the first place, and perhaps this is why I prefer bloggers to journalists.
That pretty well sums up my perspective on the whole debate. If I wanted to be a journalist, I'd go to school and get a degree in journalism. It's not that hard, and way less expensive than a real professional program like law school or medical school. It's also less demanding (and less lucrative). But I don't want to be a "real" journalist, I want to be a fan who blogs, and if a team like the Avalanche decides that I have a place in the press box or the locker room because my audience is also their audience, then I'll gladly take them up on the invitation. I'm not making any phone calls or lobbying any team executives, though.
It's not that big of a deal.
PS - Francois, call me.