Friday, May 6, 2011

Golf Writing Snobbery

I was just informed by an unnamed golf tournament that they don't have enough space to allow web writers and bloggers to receive credentials to their tournament. This, of course, after the fact that The Colonial opened their doors to me last year, and I had a great time at their event (http://golferinkilt.blogspot.com/2010/06/my-day-at-colonial.html). And I know that organizations such as Golf Writers of America still stick to their old-fashioned standards of writers having to have been published in print in order for them to even be considered for membership. And as much as I dislike it and disagree with it I guess I can sort of understand this mind set, if it's applied consistently. But then Golf Digest, one of the biggest Golf publications in the world, publish an article that's made up almost exclusively of tweets by one of their writers. I like the tactile sensation of reading a paper, but why would I bother if most of their golf and sports pieces are from newswires that I read 12 hours ago? If you're going to put yourself up on a pedestal, you need to provide the kind of content that justifies it. If you just print electronic content that some generic news service published, how in the world can you look down at other writers of electronic media?

1 comment:

  1. Great post. I mean, don't even get me started about the problems I'm seeing with golf writing..haha...I dedicated 20,000+ miles to fight the stereotypical golf article. Just keep doing what you're doing, and more tourney's will open up eventually.

    This is blasphemous to say...but the Masters is the worst for credentials. They only give out credentials to print publications. You have golf writers that only do one event per year--The Masters--and block out golf writers from digital publications that are grinding it out to write about golf, week in and week out.

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