Film Clips: On the Irony of Mark Cuban Banning Bloggers

In what has to be the most ironic post he's ever written, Mark Cuban put a piece up today on his own blog explaining his decision to ban bloggers from the Dallas Mavericks locker room. Now, Cinematical isn't a sports blog, it's a movie blog, but Cuban, of couse, also owns HDNet and Magnolia, companies we work regularly with, and so naturally I found some of the things he's had to say about his decision a bit ... disconcerting.

According to a story on the Dallas Morning News (which should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt, since they currently employ Tim MacMahon, the only blogger banned from the Mavs' locker room thus far), Cuban responded to questions from a reporter about the ban by saying "What I do care about is being fair to all bloggers," and that there's "not enough room in the locker room, nor enough media passes to fairly accommodate everyone." The DMN seems to think Cuban's decision was intended as retribution against MacMahon for writing a piece criticial of Mav's coach Avery Johnson. Cuban says it's not.

Before I go any further here, in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I worked for Cuban years ago, at his company Microsolutions, that I read his blog fairly regularly, and that I generally think he's one of the smartest people I've ever met, anywhere. Which is why both his decision to ban bloggers from the locker room, and what he has to say about it, rather flummoxes me. In the piece he wrote about the decision for his own blog, Blog Mavericks, he doesn't really explain the blogger ban, other than to say:

In particular I find it amusing that there is a presumption that if a blogger works for a big company, they must be better. The logic extends to the conclusion that if only I would evaluate the different blogs and make a qualitative selection, then big newspaper bloggers would be chosen as among the best. Let me just say, that should I go that direction, that I find quite a few individual bloggers to be far better than those earning a salary to blog . In fact, some of those blogs are written anonymously.

From there, he segues into a whole lot of stuff about how traditional media needs to stay out of the blogging business, how it's bad for their branding, and how if they want to blog they should call it something besides blogging. Which, really, begs the question of whether Cuban has been paying any attention to the growing legitimacy of bloggers in the world outside those who aren't paid to write for print outlets. I mean, seriously ... I just find it very hard to believe that Cuban doesn't know better than this. While I agree with him that TM is trying to jump on the blogging bandwagon, I certainly don't agree that blogs have no place within the branding of a print publication. Newspapers are static, they lack the interactivity and sense of community that a blog can generate. And while blogs can be written by legitimate "journalists," a print paper will never -- can never -- have the immediacy and ongoing conversation that a blog can have.

Here's another thing Cuban has to say:

Never, ever, ever consider something that any literate human being with Internet access can create in under 5 minutes to be a product or service that can in any way differentiate your business.

I find this particularly puzzling, given that Cuban created Microsolutions with two other guys, as a business providing hardware and hardware service -- something any three guys in a garage office could have created in just about five minutes. What differentiated Microsolutions -- and paved the way for Cuban to become a billionaire with the means to buy an NBA basketball team and then ban bloggers from the locker room -- was Cuban's own maverick spirit, his relentless drive, and his ability to differentiate what Microsolutions was doing from what a dozen other start-ups in Dallas were probably trying to do at around the same time.

This, by the way, is the same thing that many bloggers, whether they're blogging about film, sports, pop culture or politics, are doing now to differentiate themselves in a crowded intellectual space. The cream will rise to the top, most of the time. People read Cinematical, and come back and keep reading it, we hope, primarily for the overall quality of our content. We're not always perfect, we do make mistakes, but we strive to be professional, we have editors and editorial policies, we try to fill our staff with smart, sharp writers with unique, individual voices.

Now, I don't think for one minute that Cuban doesn't know that bloggers can and do write material that's every bit as smart (or smarter) than anything you can find in print. I don't even think that's what he's arguing here, but it's certainly become the crux of the debate going on in the comments. Maybe the Mavericks really do have hundreds or thousands of Dallas-area sports bloggers vying to cram into a smelly locker room to hang out with a bunch of half-naked athletes. Personally, I never really got the appeal of the locker room interview -- why not just either herd the guys into a spacious and well-ventilated conference room for 20 minutes right after the game, or just give them 20 minutes to shower and then interview them when they're fully clothed? But if what Cuban really seeks is parity for all bloggers, then the way to accomplish that is not to ban them from a place where their print counterparts are allowed. If the locker room is too crowded for media, be fair and ban all media and just don't do locker room interviews, period.

Fortunately, so far, there are enough seats in the movie theaters that screen films from press that Cuban hasn't yet seen the need to ban bloggers from film screenings. But as a film critic and blogger writing for Cinematical for just about three years now, I've seen and been through the struggle for legitimacy that many of us who do this for a living have gone through to slowly gain respect and recognition for the work that we do. Quality of writing has nothing whatsoever to do with the paper you're printed on, or whether you write for online, or the name of the outlet. The bottom line is, there are great writers writing blogs for nothing, and shitty writers getting paid to write for print, and vice versa. And across the board, the legitimacy of online is being recognized.

It used to be very difficult for a film blogger to get access to press screenings, screeners, interviews with talent, and press accred for major fests. Today, many of the film journalists at film festivals are either writing full-time for an online outlet, or write for both online and print. The fact that I write for a website owned by AOL, to a certain degree, makes access easier -- we can, for instance, almost always get 1:1 interviews now, as opposed to being relegated for roundtables, and that wasn't always the case.

It's also true that in some cases, it's still easier to get accreditation if you're writing for some small-town print outlet for a paper full of typos and glaring editorial errors being read by a couple thousand people, just because it's printed on paper, than if you write for a website with many millions of page views a month. But that misperception that writing for print somehow makes someone more of a journalist than writing for online, thankfully, is changing and, ultimately, I believe, will go the way of the idea that the only legitimate way to take photographs or shoot movies is with film.

I'd love to hear our readers' thoughts on all this. Feel free to discuss your own thoughts on Cuban's blogger ban, online versus traditional media, or the grossness of locker room interviews in general, in the comments. Because after all, that kind of discussion among readers is what blogging is really all about.

[via Movie City News]