In a word…”Independence“.
Just yesterday morning Mike Vukovcan of the Pittsburgh Sports Now website and blog announced to the public his resignation from KDKA-TV. Here’s the pertinent bits:
For years, I’ve battled management regarding running my own website. Twice, I was forced to take my sites down because I was told it was a conflict of interest. Take it down or lose my job. It was also a reason at one time, I had an alias Twitter name while writing for another site. No association with the site or lose my job.
A year ago, KDKA management allowed me to start Pittsburgh Sports Now but I wasn’t permitted to profit from it, work on it while at the station and all major news had to go to the stations site first.
He then writes:
All those have come into question recently and when Pittsburgh Sports Now broke the Scott Barnes story, I found myself in trouble with management.
Within the last couple of weeks, I was called into a meeting and given the ultimatum of keeping my job and taking down the site or getting fired. That brings me to my decision today to resign.
We’ll get into his personal details in a bit but I want to take a minute and tell you why I think this is such big news and why it doesn’t just effect Vukovcan only.
Ever since I had been writing for the Pitt Blather starting six years ago, straight on through starting my own blog and now today, I have been explaining to readers just what my role in the world of sports media is and how it differs from the work the beat writers from the papers and recruiting sites do. The Tribune-Review’s Jerry DiPaola and some recruiting sites’ writers for example…. and let me say up front that I have a ton of respect for all those guys.
pittpov.com 