Islanders on Thin Ice in Restricting Speech

Even as they faltered on the ice, the New York Islanders professional hockey team on Long Island has been standing tall in recent years for its bold embrace of social media.  They were one of the first teams in professional sports to provide press credentials and locker room access for bloggers, a practice in place since the 2007-2008 season, and have earned praise from marketing strategist and best-selling author David Meerman Scott as an organization that “gets it.”

This week, in the midst of a losing streak that now stands at 11 games, team management revoked the credentials of one such blogger, Chris Botta, who operates the popular site, Islanders Point Blank (www.islanderspointblank.com).  The action took Botta by surprise. While his writing has been critical of team management at times – any struggling organization should expect that – it was never vulgar or inflammatory. If anything, Botta is the team’s most avid cheerleader, a habit ingrained from the years he worked as the Islanders’ vice president of media relations.

As Botta now watches games from his couch instead of the press box, the episode raises significant questions about a professional sports team’s power to freeze out journalists who run afoul of management, whether bloggers, TV reporters or sportswriters from the daily newspaper:  If the Islanders can do it to Botta, who’s to say they can’t do it to Katie Strang of Newsday, the only traditional media outlet still interested enough to cover the team on a daily basis?

Sports journalists who lose access appear to have little recourse.  The National Professional Hockey Writers Association and its New York chapter have appealed to the National Hockey League to intervene, but the league’s stance has been that teams have final say on credentials.

Reasons for Botta’s exclusion remain unclear. The team so far has said nothing publicly about it. Speaking on the New York sports talk radio station WFAN, Botta said the team’s public relations director told him it was a management decision made because Botta had gone from “reporting the news to becoming the news.”

Botta took this as a reference to a recent article about the team’s losing streak, which pointedly noted that Islanders’ General Manager Garth Snow had declined to be interviewed for the story.

Making note of these things is fair game in journalism, as it informs readers why an article doesn’t have quotes or reflect “the side” of a particular newsmaker.

Perhaps to the general manager it appeared petty.

Certainly it is the Islanders who appear petty now.