Might be room for the league to publish the best submitted comments at the bottom of their game reports (a bit like how the ESPN site includes a fan comment with each team entry in the Power Rankings).

Not sure that their legal advisors would like them linking to 'wild west' forums - some time ago the league or BA sought legal advice on the issue of even linking to forums and the response was that they should ideally avoid it. Legally, it's a bit of a grey area.

Blogs are a different thing. To be honest, I find that they're usually (but not always) a bit too muzzled to be especially insightful and many players would need support in producing one, otherwise they run out of content ideas (see the 36ers blogs of a few years back as an example - the players would put it off mostly because they weren't sure what to write about without covering the same ground over and over).

I think the league can reach out to these providers (Derek, Gordon in Cairns, etc) in other ways - I think a few of us are included in the monthly awards voting and get Fast Facts and an Injury Report which I didn't receive a couple of years back.

I replied on JR's blog about live commentary - I think it has a place (cricket have had it for years and it's great) and I've thought about offering a mechanism for someone else to run with, but there are pitfalls: you need a reliable net connection at every game and people to always provide solid commentary (without slipping up legally with an iffy comment). No one's going to get paid to do it, which means volunteers and after a few games of having your attention at a notebook or typing at a keyboard, you'll wish you were able to enjoy the game and cheer your team like everyone else.

The other thing the fans are looking for is that interaction with the players who could run blogs as a way for them to do exactly that, connect. JR is savvy and in that thing alone is right on top of what fans are craving for.

While it would be good to have ppl at the game blogging, legal stuff will come into it, wrong thing said and all that.. plus when your watching the game, do you want to be doing that?

I would rather just see some of the players blogging and have some info that way. JR is a good mechanism, Darren Ng is another..i guess the nbl needs to see what players are going to write too. you don't want them to be help responsible for perhaps a slip of the keyboard or something like that.

XYZ

not directly, no, but we can't even get onto our own club's website...

On the legality front, JR writes a weekly column in the sports section for the Townsville Bulletin. He writes it, picks the theme himself and sends it to the Bully, who then read over it and make a few changes, corrections and then print it.

It is really as simple as that for the NBL. Now I know Howie is the only person in there and he can only be stretched so far, hopefully the NBL will have more feet on the ground next year to promote the game and their website. For just one person, Howie is doing a great job!!!

Rychart also keeps his own sight. This has pictures and his journal. Not quite a live blog but I have sertainly found it intersting. He also has a forum/ discussion board on MSN.

Only mentioned this because it is in a similar to the OP.

I think Ansty has something also (or at least he did).

Anstey shut his down some time ago. That was one that I found reasonably insightful. One method he used to get over the "ideas" stumbling block was fielding questions from fans.

Rod, any reason why the Crocs won't link to it from their site?

BTW, the latest blog piece by Mark Cuban might be of interest here - Why Pro Sports Need Newspapers. Cuban suggests that newspapers hit a far more crucial audience for clubs than new media, at this point.

A number of regular fans hit the NBL site, club sites, forums and blogs. He suggests that a high portion of occasional fans with disposable income follow teams via the paper and they're the ones that are the difference (say, at the Dome) between a crowd of 4,000 and a crowd of 6,000.

If you're too lazy to read the full piece, he recommends that as traditional newspapers struggle to adapt, clubs/leagues should prop them up - the NBL equivalent would be the league and clubs paying the salaries of Boti Nagy, Ross Lewis, Grantley Bernard, etc. In exchange, they would get a guaranteed page/portion of coverage, but not editorial control (hard to see how that would be maintained perfectly though).

I'm not convinced that's the answer though. I'd rather see papers make more effort to shift their audience online (they're barely trying right now), give up on all that paper, and then use a few other tricks to solidify their position in the media landscape.

Isaac - no, no reason