Legal Commentary

Olympics athlete blogging rules set - update

By David Canton

For my Slaw post this week I referred to my Free Press article from Monday, being the last post I made.  But I added some thoughts based on a Slaw post from the 2008 Olympics.   It reads as follows:

That?s the title of my Free Press article for this week. It talks about the new IOC rules for athlete blogging for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics. In essence, the IOC has amended its rules to allow limited blogging, and have taken the position that bloggers are not journalists. In essence, they don?t want them to be journalists, as that might run counter to the rights they sell to traditional media outlets.

In checking Slaw this morning to see if anyone else has mentioned this subject, I noticed Connie Crosby?s post from last summer about athlete blogging. She pointed out that several Canadian athletes blogged as part of the CBC?s site. That?s actually an interesting compromise. Presumably those athletes could do that without the IOC restrictions because they are doing so as part of accredited media. So to some extent the blogging athlete and the media outlet get the best of both worlds.
Read my article on my blog, on the Free Press site, or on the Canoe tech page

Full post as published by eLegal Canton on June 17, 2009 (boomark / email).