Media Not Allowed to Twitter at Indy Colts Practice, General Public Is

I love football. The history, the tradition, the way they still honor their roots as a working man’s game. It can be annoying, however, when they apply rules devised in the 1950s to technology of the 21st century.

Out of the 32 teams in the National Football League, 12 of them — including the Indianapolis Colts — have banned Twitter, blogging, and Facebook by the mainstream media during open practices.

That doesn’t apply to the general public who paid to attend the practices, just the professional media types who cover the teams and say nice things about them in order to get fans to attend.

Last week, Indianapolis Star sports columnist Bob Kravitz recently wrote about this in his column, and talked about how “Bubba from Beech Grove can sit in the stands and send up-to-the minute tweets and blog posts about the latest sweet catch by Reggie Wayne. But Peter King and John Clayton and less luminous mediots like myself cannot.”

Kravitz says he’s not on Twitter and he doesn’t blog, so he’s not actually affected, but he still believes it’s a silly rule. (In truth, Kravitz was on Twitter once. We were at an Indy 500 practice day press conference, and he said he wasn’t on Twitter. So I snapped a photo of him on my cell phone, tweeted it, and said, “now you are.”)

It is a silly rule though. I don’t know what these teams are afraid of. They let the general public post all kinds of updates, but do everything they can to hinder the pros from doing their job quickly and easily.

If Peyton Manning’s right arm suddenly fell off, Bubba from Beech Grove (he’s the Joe the Plumber of bloggers) and his PDA-bearing friends can share the information with the world immediately. The media, the folks responsible for disseminating information to the waiting world, must “sprint” the three-quarters of a mile back to the media room, where they can collect the tools of their endeavors. (Oh, yes, no cell phones on the field, either. Apparently, the NFL isn’t up to speed just yet on the “vibrate” function.)

Kravitz said one of the excuses he’s been given is that the teams don’t want reporters to send out bad information based on what they see. Rather, the coaches should be given an opportunity to put the team spin on it set the record straight.

Apparently, the Colts and the other members of the Luddite Twelve seriously underestimate the reach of some of these social media users. Believe me, if Peyton Manning’s arm falls off, and one semi-connected Twitterer gets the word out, that little bit of information will make it to hundreds of thousands of fans before his arm hits the ground. (After which, Reggie Wayne will say that he was open, and he should have been the one to catch the arm.)

Any social media user can tell you that newspapers and mainstream media just don’t have the reach and audience that some well-connected websites and blogs do. In many cases, websites like the Indianapolis Star and Colts.com are just content fodder for the bloggers (like this one, for example). It’s not until articles hit Fark or DeadSpin that the real traffic hits. (Just ask the Star. Their traffic spikes whenever one of their articles makes it to Fark.)

It’s bad enough that these teams still don’t get what social media can do for them. With the exception of a couple teams (the Colts, surprisingly, with MyColts.net), none of the teams have embraced what social networks can do to increase their fan base. They don’t do twitter, they look at blogs suspiciously, and they’re still wondering what this whole “FaceSpace” thing is all about.

By banning the people Twitter and blogging from the people who are least likely to put out bad information, the teams are only showing their ignorance and making it harder for fans — ticket buying, expensive jersey wearing fans — to immerse themselves deeper into the team experience.

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