A Wei Silly Social Media Story

This is a bit of an inside-baseball story, but one I find interesting (though, of course, your mileage may vary).  The PGA Tour has long had an awkward relationship with social media ( and the public at large), and frequently seem clueless as to how to promote their very own business.  As just one example, last year Henrik Stenson shanked a shot and was laughing about it on Twitter withing an hour of the end of his round.  Commissioner Ratched, a humorless soul, went the other direction and forced YouTube to take down the video... Can't have the public able to relate to the players, can we?  Wouldn't be prudent...

The heroine of today's tale is Stephanie Wei, proprietress of the eponymous Wei Under Par golf blog.  We last featured Stephanie when the Patrick Reed college stories broke a couple of months ago... we're always glad to have an excuse to link to her, as she's a purty young thing and running her picture can't hurt in locking down that lucrative Maggot demographic.

Here's the background per Alan Shipnuck:

Turns out the most interesting action at the Match Play Championship took place off the course. 

At first blush, Stephanie Wei versus the PGA Tour wasn’t much of a tussle. On Monday, Wei, the auteur of the popular golf blog "Wei Under Par," posted video clips of golden boy Jordan’s Spieth’s practice round on Periscope, a Twitter-owned social media app that captures and streams live video. On Thursday, the Tour yanked Wei’s credential for the rest of the 2015 season, citing multiple violations of its media regulations which prohibit accredited reporters from sharing video images of players taken at tournament venues.

Just a minute there, cowboy... the most interesting action of the week, hands down, was the Keegan Bradley- Miguel Angel Jiminez cage match.  But I digress....

Wei, 32, is one of the youngest reporters on the golf beat. A former college golfer, she left a job in the financial world to start her blog and has earned an audience with idiosyncratic posts about life on tour and her life on the road. Her social media followers—more than 40,000 across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram—have come to expect nearly constant updates, many of them accompanied by video. She recently began experimenting with Periscope, which allows individual “broadcasters” to send live video feeds to their followers and only lives within the app for 24 hours.

To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, the average golf writer has been dead for three years... Now I'm far from the perfect messenger to promote the wonders of social media, fitting solidly into that mortise demo, but how often do we hear that to grow our game we need to appeal yo the, wait for it, Millennials?  Well, Commish, that age group isn't on the couch watching CBS....

So what was Wei's crime against humanity?

On Monday at Harding Park, Wei hoofed it for Spieth’s practice round – indicative of her hustle – and was privy to some amusing trash talking and other hijinks. Wei felt that as a live streaming service Periscope was a different technology than traditional video, which gave her just enough wiggle room to post the clips. (Votaw strenuously disagrees, obviously.) Beyond that, Wei recognized Spieth is the hottest commodity in golf this minute and there is an insatiable appetite for anything he says or does. 

“There’s no golf on TV on Monday, and here was Jordan in a fun, unique setting,” Wei says. “All I was really thinking about was giving fans what they want to see.”

But Steph, you're stealing viewers from that eighth replay of Big Break - Bayonne...   Nobody disputes that the tournament is the intellectual property of the Tour, but aren't they in the business of , you know, promoting the event.  Here's Shipnuck's conclusion:

Even if Wei broke the Tour’s rules, the real issue is whether those rules make sense anymore. The Tour operates under a very traditional model in which it feels it owns the content (the tournaments and whatever the players do during them) and various rights-holders (Golf Channel, the networks) pay handsomely to borrow that content. But the sports media environment has changed at the speed of light, and fans now demand to be entertained in new and different ways, with video clips the coin of the realm. They expect this at all hours, not just on the limited, rigid broadcast schedules of various television networks. 

Golf Channel was never going to televise Spieth’s practice round, but the Tour would rather have it go unseen than allow snippets of it to be distributed by a reporter who doesn’t pay millions of dollars in rights fees. Says Votaw,”Who owns those rights? We do, not you. If you want access to those rights, you have to pay for it. When [Wei] posts unauthorized videos, she’s stealing. I don’t understand how you can’t get that through your head.” He makes the case that the NFL, NBA and Major League Baseball protect their rights-holders in similarly aggressive ways.

That's exactly the attitude that lead me to dub Ty's boss Nurse Ratched...  It's a straw man argument that effectively demolishes an argument made by exatly no one.  Wei and all sentient humans understand that Golf Channel and NBC paid handsomely for the rights to the tournament, and that posting pirated video of the Spieth-Westwood match is verboten.  But this is a practice round...

Stephanie's own account can be found here, but see if this sounds at all interesting:

Fast forward to this past Monday at TPC Harding Park. I was with a fellow media

member and we stopped on the putting green to talk to Matt Jones. We watched him finish practice putting before heading to the first hole. My colleague was walking with him as he asked him questions. I started to take a picture of the first hole and then remembered Periscope and how I’d also been seeing reporters that cover other sports using it recently. (I’d seen another member of the golf media use Meerkat, an app similar to Periscope, to broadcast a press conference recently, as well.) 

I opened the app and showed the first hole, and then Matt teeing off and walking down the fairway. I was telling him about the app while I was streaming. Comments started popping up on the bottom of the screen with questions for him, which I relayed and he answered. I remember seeing people saying things like, “This is exactly what Periscope was invented for…” — people seemed to really like the content and coverage, and I was getting all very positive feedback.

You see hw dangerous this could be....if this madness isn't kept under control, folks might find golf....interesting?

Now I think that Alan ventures into much grayer area here, perhaps muddying the waters:

The comparison fails in one crucial way: when a baseball or basketball of football game is televised viewers get to see every second of the action, always. Golf tournaments feature up to 156 players with tee times spread across five or six or seven hours on four separate days, on a playing field of 150 or so acres. Only a tiny fraction of the action is ever shown on television. Reporters on the scene can fill in some of the gaps with their words, but the ability to post short videos—and offer play-by-play on social media, also verboten by Tour rules—would be a boon to otherwise disenfranchised fans. Votaw is unmoved. “A media credential is a privilege, not a right,” he says. “You’re invited by us, and the role of the reporter is to cover the sport in a manner consistent with the media regulations you agree to.” He went on to question my impartiality in reporting on this matter.

See, that's a bridge too far... at least for now.  Rights are sold on an exclusive basis, so in making a bunch of old white men (and aren't they always the villains) comfortable with social media, better to focus on a practice round as in the present instance.

Shack is also chafing under these rules:

Longtime readers know I've obeyed this and will continue to as I sign a regulation form for the privilege of a media credential and broadcast partners are paying a premium that makes tournaments tick. However, many, many times it has pained me not to do some short videos early in a tournament week talking up something of note for architecture buffs or handicappers. But the rules are the rules. 

Conflicting news this week suggests that as with the tour's policy of not commenting on pending litigation or drug policy violations--except when the situation warrants--the PGA Tour desperately needs to sit down with their broadcast partners to sort out their social media video strategy.

Like the Wei story, that GC or NBC/CBS would object to Shack posting short videos for architectural geeks is just mindbogglingly counter-productive.   In the real world, when a policy yields an obviously misguided result, that policy is typically reevaluated... In Ponte Vedra Beach, we are instead treated to a "My Way or the Highway" lecture from Ty Votaw.  Wonder why we're not growing the game?