Like a modern-day land grab, news organizations and professional sports leagues are fighting over who gets to do what online with the sights and sounds captured by reporters covering games.

At issue isn't what reporters can do but dictates about how much of the work product of their employees publishers can use and even when and for how long. This wasn't a problem when the news hole was defined by the two-dimensional restrictions of a newspaper, or the constraints of an evening broadcast, and when the lines of business demarcation were clear. But now, because if the Internet and advances in multimedia capture technology, it’s a whole new ballgame.

Major League Baseball is upping the ante in its 2008 credentialing process by putting restrictions on what (no galleries) and how long (72 hours unless accompanied by a game story), pictures can be posted online. These are being added to existing credentialing rules, reports PDNOnline [1].

For several years MLB has restricted news agencies from publishing more than seven photos of each game. The new rules add that photos published on their own – without a game story – can only be displayed for 72 hours after the game ends.

MLB also requires reporters to seek permission to produce audio and video reports of game interviews, and limits audio and video reports made within the ballparks to two minutes or less.

The British press may have been like-minded enough to keep Prince Harry's Afghanistan deployment a secret for 10 weeks [2], but holding the line against a sports league requires a supreme level of cooperation among competitors who lack a common purpose.

The dynamic is pretty simple: If enough news organizations cave because they don't care about the restrictions – and don’t care about resisting onerous restrictions on principle -- or if a big enough player goes along because, say, the bulk of its income comes not online but from other customers, then the battle is lost.

In one successful boycott last year major news organizations boycotted Cricket Australia matches when that league sought to retain rights to news photos shot at matches, charge news organizations a fee and impose online restrictions.

After that dispute was settled Reuters’ Monique Villa told PDNOnline that boycotts, while potent, need to be a last resort. “…it is damaging for our clients, so we hate to do that. Newspapers who cannot cover properly a match that their readers are interested in, it's a disaster for us. It's a failure to serve them. When we finally come to the act of boycotting it is after a lot of discussions, and when we know there is no other way.

Is the battle worth fighting -- is this a journalism issue at all? It may not seem that MLB is trying to influence coverage in a traditional sense by trying to protect an asset it believes it owns and has the right to make more money from than the media.

But suppose you get a picture (or several) of a pitcher scuffing a ball on the mound. The rules would seem to preclude any use of those images after three days. You couldn’t make a “gallery” (whatever that means) out of them and put it on a story about pitchers who break the rules four days later or on a story about the league opening up an investigation into spitballs years later (or a story months later urging the league to open up an investigation they are loathe to).

And just forget about the slideshow with more than two minutes of natural sound from the ballpark.

So while this may appear to be a crass battle over money, it does affect freedom of the press in a meaningful way. News organizations need to be prepared to take their ball and go home with this parting shot: “Guys -- I won't tell you how to convince taxpayers it's in their interest to finance the construction of private stadiums on private property, and you stay out of my newsroom.”

Mark Mittlestadt, Executive Director of the Associate Press Managing Editors, says the AP and its three editor associations – APME, AP Sports Editors and AP Photo Managers, are strongly resisting the MLB terms. In a letter [3] to MLB commissioner Bud Selig, the APME noted the long relationship between America’s newspapers and the National Pastime.

Newspaper coverage of MLB is woven into the fabric of American life, with readers across this country daily beginning their days consuming the coverage we provide. As society moves deeper into the digital age, newspaper coverage – including work done on our Web sites – must continue to chronicle America's pastime with the same depth and heart that we've displayed since the game's inception.

Please don't handcuff the institutions which for more than a century have drawn millions of fans to MLB by chronicling the great moments and the great players that have kept baseball vibrant through times good and bad.

It looks like the war may already be over, but each of these battles is worth fighting.

UPDATE .....

In a letter to Selig, Online News Association President Jonathan Dube said the ONA "strongly objects" [4] to the MLB terms.

Our association, which represents more than 1,200 online news media members, believes that
many of the proposed restrictions are contrary to the interests of Major League Baseball, to
baseball fans and to our members, who cover sports news in an emerging multimedia
environment.

These terms interfere with our members’ ability to do their jobs as journalists and cover news of
public importance ... The restrictions in these credentials make it harder for the members of ONA to do their jobs as journalists.