Good piece in today’s New York Times about tensions being fleshed out between sports franchises, leagues and reporters, due to the emergence of sports blogging, or as bloggers are fond of calling it — online media.

The dispute has grown lately between the press and organized sports over issues like how reporters cover teams, who owns the rights to photographs, audio and video that journalists gather at sports events, and whether someone who writes only blogs should be given access to the locker room.

The explosion of new media, especially with regard to advertising income, has made competitors out of two traditional allies — news media and professional sports.

The article goes so far as to trace the tension back to the 1930s, when teams switched from train travel to air travel, thereby creating a wedge between players and reporters, who no longer had time to chat, smoke and gamble together.

One of the hot issues here is intellectual property…something that MLB tends to be pretty stingy about.

For example, the Media Law Resource Center, a group whose members include most major media organizations, has commissioned legal research in anticipation of the question of media restrictions going to the courts. One tactic being considered is to challenge M.L.B.’s antitrust exemption.

“My view is that this is news gathering, and I look for legal responses to any effort to clamp down on news gathering,” said Sandra Baron, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center. “What I see is a strident effort by a powerful monopoly to control information. They have a monopoly on the game. Now they want to have a monopoly on the information.”

Read the article for yourself. I think what the writer is trying to get at here, is that sports media coverage is being turned upside down by online media and neither the major sports media, nor the MLB, knows quite what to do about it. Both are trying to compromise, but have a hard time doing it and a reluctant to work together. The sports media is a little more willing to compromise because its wallet more directly threatened.

Don’t assume that because I’m writing as a blogger here that I automatically side with the online media. I don’t necessarily. Mostly, I just like watching other parties struggling to come to grips with online media. Just as I enjoyed watching the music industry not come to grips with file sharing.