Working the Corners

If you want to take a look behind the curtain of NHL hockey coverage, read on. If not, skip the following. It does go on at length.

I spent an hour yesterday on a conference call with other members of the Professional Hockey Writers Association (PHWA) as we wrestled with whether or not to participate in this week’s NHL awards voting and cast ballots in the competition for the five trophies that we have control over. Those are the Hart, Norris, Selke, Calder and Lady Byng – as well as the NHL all-star and rookie all-star teams.

The hot-button issue is the decision by the New York Islanders last fall to revoke the working credential of Chris Botta, the team’s former media director who had gone on to a new journalistic career as what maybe is best described as an online mainstream reporter.

Botta was working for AOL FanHouse at the time and also had his own blog that was once funded by the Islanders themselves. Now he covers hockey online for the New York Times and it doesn’t get any more mainstream (and credible) than that in my line of work.

A member of the PHWA, Botta has no trouble working in all NHL arenas – except Nassau Coliseum, where the team made him persona non grata after a series of disagreements with Islanders general manager Garth Snow. Like any guild or union or association, the PHWA exists and collects dues to protect all of our interests, so we have a big problem with what the Islanders have done.

When the NHL stopped short of ordering the Islanders to admit Botta, talk began of boycotting the awards vote. It came up for discussion at the all-star game, but didn’t seem to gain any traction. Then, last week the three New York chapters that cover the Islanders, Rangers and Devils all voted not to participate.

That takes about 23 of the PHWA’s 180 members out of the picture.

Ultimately, the 20 chapters taking part in yesterday’s conference call stopped short of joining them, though individuals were free to follow their own conscience and a writer for Nashville’s City Paper has added his name to the boycott side.

The PHWA instead decided that, in part because the commitment already had been made to take part in this year’s voting, more effrort could still be made to get the NHL to assure us that teams would not be able to withdraw a PHWA member’s credential in the future barring some act that was so horrible the writers’ group would nod in agreement.

Here’s the statement, written by Terry Frei of the Denver Post, that was released by the PHWA today:

As the NHL’s 2010-11 regular season winds down, and with voting on the league’s awards imminent, the Professional Hockey Writers Association remains adamantly opposed to – and distressed by – the early season decision of the New York Islanders to revoke the media credential of a PHWA member.

This is even more objectionable than the original decision itself: In the months since, league officials have refused to intervene and overrule the Islanders’ decision, which would serve to re-emphasize the NHL’s commitment to facilitate objective and authoritative coverage from PHWA members.

The media marketplace is changing daily, and newspapers and other outlets for written journalism are among those adapting. To its credit, the NHL and its teams have aggressively taken on the challenge of creating and enhancing their “own” coverage on several platforms, going beyond the more traditional “in-house” broadcasts to now include team web sites and other outlets.

Yet the league’s savvy fan base understands the need for, and desires, independent and objective coverage that doesn’t pass through league and team filters.

Our concern is that this decision, if allowed to stand and become precedent, signals an end to the league’s agreement that independent and objective coverage not only benefits its fan base, but the NHL itself.

The PHWA’s position is absolute. The splitting of hairs about the circumstances of the Islanders’ decision is an irrelevant waste of time. We ask that the NHL disavow the Islanders’ capricious decision in this specific instance, but even more important, reaffirm that – barring egregious actions that would cause the PHWA to expel a member, anyway — PHWA members will be granted access to cover its teams.

Meanwhile, three of our chapters – those made up of writers who cover the Islanders, New York Rangers and New Jersey Devils – have decided not to participate in the PHWA voting for the NHL’s 2010-11 regular-season awards. That voting selects the winners of most of the league’s major trophies and its first- and second-team all-stars.

The PHWA takes seriously its role as an authoritative, objective and independent voting body for these awards, and is honored to participate in the process. It also respects and will support the decisions of individual members not to return their ballots, which the league already has distributed to PHWA members. However, the PHWA also believes that because the voting process has begun, both the writers’ organization and the league have entered into a mutual and honorable pact to see through the voting process for the 2010-11 awards.

The PHWA is confident that with potentially nearly 90 percent of its 177 members continuing to participate, the pool of voters — which has grown significantly in recent years – is more than sufficient to maintain the integrity of the voting.

In the upcoming offseason, the PHWA hopes to again meet with NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman and other league officials to seek clarification of the credentialing issue and to discuss the future of the PHWA’s role as an independent and objective voting bloc in continuing to bolster the credibility of the league’s awards.
 

*****We’ve expanded the membership of the San Jose chapter this season and now there are five of us: myself, Mark Emmons and Mark Purdy of the Merc, Susan Slusser of the Chronicle and AOL Fanhouse (RIP), and Bob Burch of the Gilroy Dispatch. Longtime member Ross McKeon now of Yahoo Sports! decided a couple months ago that he wasn’t getting to enough games to justify continuing on, and I couldn’t talk him out of that decision.

*****As some of you know, the Sharks pulled the credential of blogger Ryan Garner of Hockeybuzz after the 2009 playoffs. Other teams, I’m advised, have taken similar measures with bloggers elsewhere.

But this is the first time that a PHWA member has had a credential pulled and that is seen as the significant distinction in Botta’s case.

The New York Times, by the way, does not permit its writers to vote in any awards balloting in order to maintain journalistic independence, so Botta did not have to decide how he would have handled the situation.

And to circle back to the local situation, though Garner still writes for Hockeybuzz, daily Sharks coverage there is now handled by Cam Gore.