Second-class Citizens   

Olympic officials unfairly shut out online journalists.

IMAGINE THE AGONIZING years of sweat and tears, of battling the odds, of struggling for recognition from doubters and critics, of pushing the limits of journalistic perfection...only to have your dreams pulverized before the opening ceremony with these words: "No, you may not have a press pass."
Perhaps that's a bit melodramatic. But the insult surely must sting.
Maybe the International Olympics Committee doesn't give a flying vault that it dashed the aspirations of the Web reporters who'd expected to stand shoulder to shoulder with their peers at Sydney. After all, what can the exiles possibly do to retaliate? Stand outside the gates and throw stones?
There was a series of controversial media restrictions imposed by the IOC and the news organizations covering the summer games this year. Foremost was NBC's decision to forgo live coverage and delay packaged events for as long as a day. Next was the decision to stomp any Webcasting of what had been earlier predicted to be the first Internet Olympics. Even the ban on online athlete diaries raised resentment among contestants who had planned on e-mailing journals to friends, family, fans--and yes, even sponsors--back home.
Those decisions might have been provincial, archaic or short-sighted, but at least they were tailored toward a real goal: guarding the rights of television networks that paid good money for exclusive visual drama. The IOC wanted no risk that a finish line would be crossed or a tear would be shed through an unofficial lens.
But between these Olympic moments, there could be no regulation of words or results. The IOC doled out press credentials this year to over 20,000 reporters from newspapers, magazines, wire services and broadcast news operations. Scores and stories were published as soon as they could be phoned or e-mailed from the stands.
Only Internet journalists were uniformly blacklisted. For the third straight Olympics, working for a news or sports Web site would not qualify you for credentials. Not even if you worked for ESPN.com or CBS Sportsline. Not even if you promised to check your digital camera and laptop at the door and walk in with a notepad and pencil. If you were part of the online media, you were unimportant at best, suspect at worst.
The reason for that rule, according to the IOC, was to protect the video rights of exclusive broadcasters like NBC.
Nonsense. Keeping press passes away from Internet reporters has no connection to preventing piracy.
In reality, the biggest potential and actual violators of the Webcasting rule were not renegade Web reporters, but traditional TV camera crews.
IOC defenders might say its press restrictions had little real impact on the business of online news. That's true. The games were an unequivocal victory for the designers, programmers and owners of news and sports Web sites.
Millions of visitors went to sites like NBCOlympics.com and CNNSI.com for immediate scores and times. Olympics sections snapped with colorful background content--from historic trivia to athlete profiles to animated demonstrations of the events themselves. To patch the original content holes, the sites simply relied on wire copy or stories gathered by the "real" reporters working for their parent companies.
But the blacklist was a slam to the legitimacy of the profession. For Web reporters struggling to prove their worth by originating unique and breaking stories, being shut out of competition is quite a blow to professional pride.
The standoff isn't unique to the Olympics. Since the birth of Internet news, online journalists have had to scratch and claw for credentials that are granted freely to other types of reporters. Being banned from the biggest international sports event of the year just seems particularly harsh.
With rather cruel timing, the IOC announced in an August 24 press release that it will hold a press conference in Lausanne, Switzerland, in December to "help the sports world understand and develop strategies to take advantage of new media opportunities."
In recent published reports, the IOC's director of new media hinted this might mean letting Internet reporters into the Salt Lake City games in 2002. There is also speculation that limited Webcasting might be allowed in the near future, if only by authorized television broadcasters.
So Net reporters are escorted from Sydney with the same empty consolation as the rest of the Olympic also-rans:
"Sorry, better luck next time."