DETROIT, MI – OCTOBER 19: A general overview of Ford Field during the game between the New Orleans Saints and the Detroit Lions on October 19, 2014 in Detroit, Michigan. The Lions defeated the Saints 24-23. (Photo by Jeremy Rafter/Getty Images)
By Dan Levy on

There’s nothing like a little preseason football to remind local NFL beat writers their coverage is no longer necessary.

Before Thursday’s Detroit Lions preseason opener against the New York Jets, MLive Media Group beat reporter Kyle Meinke tweeted news that would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so damned expensive.

Meinke noted that the cables themselves are free, but to use them to get internet access would cost the reporters in attendance an insane $150 per game.

Factoring in eight home contests and two preseason games, that’s $1500 per reporter for direct internet access in the Ford Field press box, when last season—and presumably every season since the internet in press boxes has existed—the wires and the access they bring were free.

Meinke noted that media were still able to connect via wifi in the Ford Field press box for free, but if anyone has ever worked a game with more than 100 scribes filing stories and photographers stealing all the bandwidth to upload photos, on top of all the wireless interference in the stadium from thousands of fans using their mobile devices, it’s insanely frustrating to cover an event without a solid internet connection.

Even all the basic structural concerns of using a wireless system in a space as vast as a stadium press box makes using wifi-only a strange move for a communications staff suddenly charged with troubleshooting internet issues for media instead of working on covering the game.

In short, bad internet makes everyone angry. Angry media will find a way to take out that out on your team. The Lions should have anticipated this.

They also should have anticipated the beat writers would revolt, or at the very least pool their money together and purchase one Ethernet access point to share, then take photos of all of them huddled around a single cord filing stories to shame the Lions into changing their policy.

Thankfully for all involved, it didn’t get to that.

Without looking at a press row seating chart, the fact the Lions provided free Ethernet to just the first row is also interesting.

In most press boxes, the prominent beat writers get the best seats, which means not only the front row, but the best angle of the field as well (unless you’re a beat writer in Washington where every press box angle sucks, but that’s another story for another day).

The rest of the first row is usually reserved for the second and third scribes from each major local outlet—your once-a-week columnists and the like—as well as national scribes who come in from big shops just on game days. Top opposing-team media usually get first row seating as well, shuttled to one side of the press box or another.

Depending on how popular your team is at the time, the second row could have a bit of overflow from both the local and national groups, and certainly from the opposing-team media, but it’s mostly filled out by online publications and small daily and woebegone weekly papers that still get credentialed for some reason. Oh, and radio guys.

If you ever hear those “let’s go to Detroit for an update from Jim” updates on national radio, Jim is almost always in the second row, and Jim is almost always super loud in the press box when Jim is doing those reports.

The third row is usually reserved for game day staff and random luminaries who aren’t working, but didn’t want to buy a ticket and still need a seat. They usually aren’t using the internet.

It’s the whole attitude of “we don’t need you” that’s the real issue here. Truth be told, NFL teams don’t need the local media at games anymore, which is part of the reason they can (try to) pull this kind of stuff.

With television rights holders paying billions of dollars to put games on the air, it’s in their best interest to cover all the teams in the league. With the NFL and its teams hiring talented journalists away from local media outlets to work on league and team-run websites, a team like the Lions can provide far more access than the media covering them will ever be afforded, making independent local media a competitor to coverage, not a conduit.

To this wired-internet issue specifically, it sort of makes sense why the Lions would be going wifi-only in today’s age of technology—I don’t even have a working laptop anymore, instead going with a tablet-and-keyboard combination—but springing a charge like $150 on media at the first home game is a clear misstep for a team that traditionally needs local media on its good side.

Having worked on the game day communications side for years, I know how much it costs to run a game operation, and I understand why teams have gone away from providing, say, free meals to media, instead charging those in attendance a nominal fee for a pre-game meal.

Teams don’t pay for media to travel to a game, so the courtesy of providing a meal was always just that; a courtesy. The company a writer works for often provides travel expenses, and a meal—be it in the press box, the concession stand or the local fast food joint two blocks from the stadium—should be included in any per diem.

This wasn’t that. This wasn’t a team tired of paying for water bottles to give the media. This was a team standing next to a water cooler and trying to charge $150 per swig.

What the Lions may not have factored: to a beat writer on deadline, good internet is a more life-sustaining commodity than water.

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About Dan Levy

Dan Levy has written a lot of words in a lot of places, most recently as the National Lead Writer for Bleacher Report. He was host of The Morning B/Reakaway on Sirius XM's Bleacher Report Radio for the past year, and previously worked at Sporting News and Rutgers University, with a concentration on sports, media and public relations.

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