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Tim McMahon is a basketball blogger who works for the website of the Dallas Morning News.

McMahon reported yesterday afternoon that, amazingly, the Mavericks have just launched a policy banning bloggers -- or at least any writer who is primarily a blogger -- from the Dallas locker room.

McMahon reports that the new policy is as follows:

The Dallas Mavericks will not allow ANY writer into the locker room areas pre-game and post-game whose primary purpose is to blog no matter what affiliation. They may still represent their respective publication at games but will not be granted locker room access.

Furthermore, if a blog writer is coming to cover a game, the publication must inform the Mavericks PR staff they are sending a blogger. In order to enforce this policy, we must know this information.

We have gone this route because we did not want to give preferential treatment to any blogger, whether they are an individual or from a large media outlet. We just do not have enough room in the locker room, nor enough media passes to fairly accommodate everyone.

I found the whole thing pretty hard to believe. So hard to believe, in fact, that my first move was to check with the Mavericks to see if that really is their new policy. They say it is. And then I put some questions to Mark Cuban by email, and he was nice enough to answer some of them.

Here is the most interesting part of the exchange. First I wrote:

If a blogger had $100 million they could start their own paper, and according to your rules, make it to the locker room.

And I'm not sure you can demonstrate that newspapers, with all their standards, are more accurate than the best bloggers.

The only difference is the platform. And you and I both know you will never have any way to offer every blogger a way to cover the game. So you are permanently banning an important new medium.

And Cuban responded:

We have to set limits somewhere, right? Should every blogger be allowed in? And when there are 25 of them, how do we decide who gets in or not? If they need access to a player, they can get an interview. It just won't happen in a locker room.

And no one with half a brain with $100 million is going to start a newspaper. You can buy them for ten cents on the dollar. So it's not a real comparison.

Then I replied:

In dealing with traditional media, you simply have to make judgments about who matters and who doesn't. A good RSS reader and a half-hour a day of someone's time in the PR department is all it would take to do the same with blogs. You'd know, and credentialing would be easy, even if you only had two seats. You'd use your own organization's good judgment.

Instead you have a policy where someone who writes on paper -- even the school paper -- is a candidate for your locker room, but some of the most cutting edge journalists in the world are not.

And he has not yet replied to that, however on his blog (ironic, huh?) blog, Cuban discusses his decision, and McMahon specifically:

Prior to last week, I had no idea this person's primary job at the Morning News is to blog. I hadn't seen or read it. He was just one of the 4 or 5 people from the Morning News in the locker room post game. When it was brought to my attention I immediately made it an issue. Why ?

Not because I don't want this blogger in the locker room doing interviews. What I didn't like was that the Morning News was getting a competitive advantage simply because they were the Dallas Morning News. I am of the opinion that a blogger for one of the local newspapers is no better or worse than the blogger from the local high school, from the local huge Mavs fan, from an out of town blogger. I want to treat them all the same.

Unfortunately, there isn't enough room to allow any and all bloggers in the locker room. There also are no standards that I have been able to come up with that differentiate between bloggers to the point where I should or should not credential one versus the other.

Cuban also adds:

Some out there will take this as my not "liking" blogs. Ridiculous. its the exact opposite. What I don't like is unequal access. I'm all for bloggers getting the same access as mainstream media when possible. Our interview room is open to bloggers. We take interview requests from bloggers. I'm a fan of getting as much coverage as possible for the Mavs. What I'm not a fan of is major media companies throwing their weight around thinking they should be treated differently.

Look, I know there are real problems in this world, like war, famine, tsunamis, and hurricanes. This ranks squarely as a weenie little injustice that very few people care about.

But it's foolish and unjust nonetheless. Let me explain.

Is This Really About All Bloggers, or One Blogger?
It's an honest question. McMahon believes that the policy was born merely as a reaction to the fact that McMahon recently wrote a blog post that was somewhat critical of Avery Johnson and somewhat sympathetic to a website calling for Johnson to be fired.

Cuban says he has not read that blog. (This could be true. But this is the best-read Mavericks blog. Cuban is not only known to be an obsessive consumer of Mavericks-related media who reports he gets news alerts when his name is mentioned online. He is also a blogger himself, as well as a major player in a blog search engine company.)

Reading comments and email, it seems like a fair chunk of those following this story suspect this is not a policy born of what's best for the Mavericks long-term. Even on Cuban's own blog there is plenty of dissension. Some comments from Blog Maverick:

• AV: "This is ridiculous, Mark. The Dallas Morning News is free publicity for your team as well as a place for your team's fans to read more about the team they love. Moves like this back up a growing public sentiment (not media sentiment, but the thoughts of real fans) that you are a big baby who can't stand to hear negative opinions about yourself or your team. Take a lesson from Jerry Jones and realize that if people are talking about your team's performance good or bad, it is a good thing. It means you are relevant and that people still care. You have created a negative impression of yourself which trickles down to your fans. We want to be proud of our team from top to bottom. Your childish reactions to negative comments regarding yourself or the Mavs make that difficult. Please grow up and learn to be a good sport."
• Joshua Wells: "Really weak. That blog was the best source for Mavs information. The fact that he did his reporting through a blog doesn't make him any less of a reporter. The medium is not the key here. If this were the 1950's, Mark would be keeping out TV reporters because only newspaper writers are real reporters, and a TV Personality is a TV Personality is a TV Personality. I'm a huge Cuban fan. He was a breat
  h of fresh air for the NBA and he resurrected my team, but I'm very disturbed by this act."
• Will: "I've been in the locker room on several occasions and have never found it to be too small. I'm sure there are occasions that I've missed where it's fairly full, but it's nothing like the Cowboys locker room after one of their games. I agree that there needs to be some kind of standards set as to who qualifies for credentialing and access, but a blogger/writer for a local paper should be given access to perform his/her job. I believe that a blogger from the Dallas Morning News is different that a blogger from johndoe.com. The paper's bloggers all write feature articles and other stories. The paper itself has presumably done background checks and other due diligence before hiring the writer. While it would be nice to treat all bloggers as the same, it's just not the case that they are the same."

Blogs are Here to Stay, and Some of them are Serious Journalism
Time will certainly prove Mark Cuban wrong in his assessment that all bloggers must be given equal access. For one thing, it's impractical. I very much doubt the Mavericks can offer every interested blogger the kind of access they are now offering Tim McMahon (which includes a seat at a game), which Cuban appears to be promising.

I guess this might sound like sour grapes from me: "Ooh, Mr. Big Shot ESPN blogger wants to be differentiated from the 'little guys.'"

On the contrary. I'm thinking of myself back when I owned TrueHoop. I had no real audience at first, but I was working on this thing day and night, developing sources, and writing as fairly as I knew how. What's more I had a background covering the NBA for magazines, and professional journalism training, experience, and awards.

I have always used the same software as people who included pictures of half-naked women with every post to drive online ad revenue. Others have a lot of drinking games, unfounded rumors, video games, and porn.

A lot of bloggers, I'm thinking, do not expect to be allowed into locker rooms. I know I probably lose every time if the debate is which kind of blog is most fun at a party. But I think I ought to win if the contest is about who do you trust to act like a responsible journalist around your players? (Not that that should be the criteria, but I believe it often is.)

Especially when I have been around the players, even as a blogger at very crowded events like the NBA Finals, for a decade. I didn't suddenly become irresponsible.

And I'm not the only one. Tim McMahon is another. His blog takes the Mavericks extremely seriously, and plays an important part in the conversation surrounding the team.

Sports journalism has long been almost a closed profession -- open only to those who are extremely lucky, or connected to an insider in some way. Blogs are an avenue into sports writing for the super-talented who did not happen, like I did, to go to school with the managing editor of Inside Stuff magazine.

Consider Tom Ziller of Sactown Royalty. If you want the best coverage of the Kings, you have to follow a mix of sources that now includes Ziller. He's an important part of the Kings media landscape. With a full-time job, he's also too busy to attend a lot of games. But if he wanted to go, there'd be no reason not to have him there.

And it's not like those vaunted newspaper standards are a cure-all. Cuban himself has, in his mind, proven again and again that a certain Chicago columnist is a peddler of false information. But because he's in the magical glow if an established media institution with some muscle, he gets in while someone like Ziller is persona non grata?

I recently went to a conference called the Networked Journalism Summit. Bigwigs -- the kind of people who go to Davos and run newspapers and TV networks -- were there. There was no debate in that room about whether or not media was headed in the direction of conversational online media. The only questions were about how best to deploy such new tools most effectively. Newspaper executives talked about reassigning some of their most respected writers so that, instead of writing for their papers, they were blogging and interacting with readers and experts in new ways.

Conversational online media, including blogging, is the future of not just amateur media, but professional media, too. It's a really weird moment in history to shut the door to bloggers, and I'm quite certain it can't stay closed for long.

Not to mention, have you noticed what's happening in politics? Talking Points Memo is self-supporting with a growing staff. It is one of dozens of sites that shape the political media, but it's "just" a blog. If Cuban were running a political campaign, would he keep bloggers from his candidate?

Use Common Sense to Give Credentials to Media that Matter
Journalists who spend plenty of time in the Dallas locker room swear to me that Dallas has more room than many around the league, and space is not a notable issue. And the blogger in question has been credentialed thus far without crippling space trouble. During the NBA Finals, that locker room served reasonably well with many times the number of people it has to serve for a regular season game.

Nevertheless, let's take Cuban at his word that space is the overriding issue, and in the big picture the team is fretting about how to keep numbers down.

The way I see it, teams have two choices in dealing with the ever-changing media landscape.

• They can make it their business to follow everyone who matters who covers their team, and after doing some homework, credential all the most relevant and important ones in accordance with space needs.
• Or they can keep numbers down by discriminating by medium. Which sure seems odd.
  

I get it: the internet is new and weird, and media is changing. Tools are changing. But the underlying fact remains that teams find it in their best interest to accommodate the media, who in turn discuss the team with the public, who are themselves the lifeblood of the business of a team. In deciding which members of the media to host at games, I'm squarely of the opinion that the team must use its best judgment. There will never be a simple litmus test, especially not in an evolving world of new technologies.

And to anyone who says, as Cuban does, that there are not good standards for determining which blogs are "valid" and which ones aren't, I ask: how hard are you trying?

I don't think anyone who reads a lot of blogs would agree. After a while, you just kind of know.

My guess is that many teams simply don't have people in positions of power reading blogs. By handing out credentials, they are being asked to regulate blogs, which is a tough situation.

My basic suggestion to all NBA teams would be to tell bloggers they'll have to document that they have averaged some amount of traffic, two thousand unique visitors a day or so, for six months or so, before they can apply. And once they have applied, I'd urge the team to get someone to read those blogs every day for a little while (you're behind already if you're not doing this, by the way teams, but start now for next year).

Then look at how much room you have for the media and use your common sense.

Teams that apparently do read blogs aren't wrestling with this in the same way. For instance, the Blazers credential Oregonlive's Blazer Blog (they even hired away the main blogger there, Casey Holdahl, to work on their own site) and the independent BlazersEdge. My sense is that they didn't think being involved with those bloggers was all that risky, because they know those bloggers from reading them every day.

The Mavericks ought to consider doing the same.

(Photo by Tim Heitman/NBAE via Getty Images)