E-Media Tidbits

Mark J. Terrill / AP via MLB NY Mets Cliff Floyd celebrates with Shawn Green.

It's 6 a.m. in Jerusalem, midnight in the U.S., and I am up early to help my son get out of the house for a daylong hiking trip. So I popped on the laptop to get the score of last night's NY Mets-L.A. Dodgers NLDS Game 3. As a native New Yorker, baseball is still more of my game than soccer, the Israeli passion.

I went first to MLB.com -- not to the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, or ESPN sites. And I was rewarded for doing so: MLB.com had two "mainbar" stories -- one from the Mets' side, the other from the Dodgers'. (I really like that "hometown" coverage balance. The stories essentially were, "Mets Win," and "Dodgers Lose."). Also offered were video clips and a few sidebars. Each story says it was not approved by MLB.com -- that is, they are ostensibly "fair and balanced" reporting.

In contrast, all that NYT, SI and ESPN had to offer was the same AP story. That's it.

The game had only just ended, and it was the middle of the night in America. I'm sure the big media mentioned above will weigh in with a ton of material soon afterward. But MLB -- ostensibly a PR operation for baseball -- offered better, objective, "straight" coverage of the game than the mainstream media.

When the sponsoring organization does better than the news media in covering events of interest in real time, it certainly should be troubling for those concerned about the media's future, and damaging to their online traffic patterns.

I will stick with MLB.com through the rest of the playoffs and World Series -- and that doesn't even include the possibility of paying for access to live, online radio and video coverage of the games.