Maybe the newest thing about new media is how it will be managed in the marketplace.

Those who follow such issues were intrigued last spring when the Association and the Louisville Courier-Journal became entwined in a brief but inflammatory dispute over the newspaper’s right to post real-time game updates from the super-regional round of the Division I Baseball Championship.

Much of what was written at the time focused on red herrings, such as the media’s First Amendment rights to write almost whatever they please. Quite clearly, the media possesses that privilege, the same as every other American citizen. What they do not possess is the authority to determine the conditions under which they are credentialed.

Over the years, sports enterprises and the media who cover them have maintained a sort of “Odd Couple” relationship. Coverage of sports events has taken place under the heading of news and, in many senses of the word, it is news. After all, thousands of people attend these events, and thousands more want to read about them the next morning.

But newspapers have sports sections because they make money, either by prompting customers to purchase the paper or through the advertising they attract. There are few serious right-to-know or need-to-know issues surrounding the daily fodder of game outcomes, contract disputes, injuries to key players and athlete indiscretions. In many metropolitan dailies, the sports section is a journalistic Pottersville, a place where you find advertisements for everything from liquor stores to topless bars. Those sponsors simply want to appeal to the raucous element of the 20- to 35-year-old male demographic.

This dance takes two partners, of course. Sports teams and leagues have always been willing to go along with the news illusion since being “news” has been the ticket into the newspaper and the free publicity that comes with it. It is a marriage of convenience that has worked for most of the last century.

But times are changing.

Sports organizations are increasingly aware of the changing commercial environment that surrounds them. Television rights fees alone will not be able to sustain the income to which they have become accustomed and for that reason, most have awarded their media partners live Internet rights. The NCAA is among the many to go down that path.

That approach butts squarely against newspapers, who for the first time are being restricted on what content they can provide under the terms of their credentials. For its part, the NCAA has created a zone on NCAA.com where newspapers can blog live if they agree to play by the Association’s rules. Critics have gnawed at the NCAA policy, which is rather detailed, all the way down to how often updates can be provided from the fencing championships. Still, if one accepts that it is appropriate for the Association to collect the rights fee in the first place, then the NCAA’s action is completely within industry norms.

As for the newspapers, the public likely does not understand the anxiety of their 21st century existence. Their print side is buffeted by ever-higher manufacturing and delivery costs. The obvious answer is to emphasize Internet delivery, but the Web has not proven itself to be an easy source of revenue for them. The Gannett Company – the biggest of the chains – has responded by ordering its newspapers to create online “information centers,” sites where readers can learn virtually everything happening in their communities, from traditional news to school lunch menus to your neighbor’s property tax payments. That new philosophy may help newspapers commercially, but it does involve a remake of the classic definition of news.

The sleight of hand, of course, is that newspapers most often characterize everything written by their reporters as news, thus attaching an overheated freedom-of-the-press component to any argument about how far their rights extend.

The only authority that the NCAA claims in this matter is the power of credentialing. If any media entity wants the access that comes with credentials, then it must abide by the rules. If not, then it may post as many live updates as it wants, but without any access.

After it flared in June 2007, this topic went subterranean until December, when various blogs and bulletin boards became aware of the new NCAA policy. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education followed. Still, considering how contentious the Louisville issue was, matters have been rather quiet. We’ll see how it goes this spring at several high-profile championships.

In the meantime, readers should be discerning as they digest newspaper coverage of this subject. What is written may be completely correct and objective, but there is no denying that newspapers have a financial interest in the outcome.

As they say in journalism school, “Always consider the source.”