I guess a daily athletes blog is out of the question

[Steve Bildermann]

Japan's Olympic team warns Yomiuri over judo story

http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/20040816p2a00m0dm012000c.html

Japan's team participating in the ongoing Athens Olympics has warned the Yomiuri Shimbun national daily for publishing a story written by a judo gold medalist.

It urged the publisher of the paper with the largest circulation in Japan to make sure that such an incident does not happen again.

[Taro Toporific]

Japan's team participating in the ongoing Athens Olympics has warned the Yomiuri Shimbun national daily for publishing a story written by a judo gold medalist..

I suppose judo-ka and other Japanese athletes would be too tired from tryiing to write a sentence that they couldn't compete the next day. :P

Notice that the news article has no description WHY an athlete's blog is out of the question. It's a just rule.

(Without the Five "W"s answered, the Japanese are setting themselves up for ridicule. )

[Unspoken]

Japan isn't the only country to do this. In other nations, though, it's actually the various commercial and media outlets pushing the governments to get rid of blogging.

Why?

Well, apparently if we let our athletes blog, it will indubitably hurt our "insert-country's-name" economy and tarnish its wonderfully impecable image.

...which is akin ot telling a young girl that if she crosses the street, pink elephants from Mars will beat up her brother.

The real reason is fear of change by those who are currently running the show. For years now journalists have been shaking in their boots in fear of what blogs (the organized group ones, and the personal, unaffiliated ones) might mean to the security of their niche. The NYTimes recently printed a rather heavy-handed article about blogs that consisted wholly of allusions to the notion that all blogs are written by autistic or ignorant teenagers whose amateurish attempts at writing are simply a cute, new-age waste of time. If blogs are unofficially black-balled, newspapers will eventually succumb to the desire to get the scoop and probably reprint some of these stories that the public's dying to hear, which was exactly the case here, but the problem is most of them want to ban blogs outright. Now they're not out on a futile crusade to take down the net, but they've been continuously urging the government to step in and prevent blogging of individuals who would almost surely end up in the news sooner or later (i.e. soliders, athletes, etc.)

Their excuse?

Only long-trusted newspapers can professionally tell these stories, and any amateurish attempts to do so will most likely result in great emberassment for "insert-country's-name".

Commercial sponsors are even worse. Their stance is that since they're the ones shelling out money, they should be able dictate what comes out of the mouths of the people they're so generously sponsoring. I mean, just imagine the havoc some random gold-medalist shmock would cause if he ever publically confessed to drinking the wrong bottled water!!! And if you think that that's way over the top, just ask all those spectator's in Athens who were turned away from the gates--with their tickets in hand--simply because they were wearing commercial products of the sponsors' rivals.

Well screw that! Viva la blogging revolution!