April 7, 2004

How Augusta Beat The Times (With Blogs!)

Sports Illustrated is running an excerpt from a new book by Alan Shipnuck, The Battle For Augusta National, which claims Augusta National Golf Course fought back against last year's sustained assault by the New York Times (over its refusal to admit women) by planting information with a few key "influential" blogs.

A web junkie who requires hourly fixes, McCarthy knew instinctively that blogging could have a profound effect on moving public opinion about Augusta National. "Media crit through blogging has become so cutting-edge, the only analogies I can think of are military," he says. "It's like secondary shrapnel. It's like blowback. Because of the viral nature of linking, one story, one idea, can spread to thousands of websites in a matter of hours. It's a great way to set the record straight and get your point of view on record in an immediate way. It is a hypereffective way to defend clients in the face of a media onslaught. There is an old maxim that you don't get into a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel. Well, the Internet is equivalent to thousands of barrels of ink."

From the moment he was hired by Augusta National, McCarthy began "steering information and planting ideas" with about a dozen bloggers and online media critics. "I recognized that the mainstream golf press was going to be resistant," he says. "Certainly there was a core group of writers who were openly hostile to the club's views. Blogs opened up a new front. It was a process of germination. The plan was to construct ideas with the media that would act as a filter so they would read subsequent pieces of information with the lens that you created." McCarthy had no trouble picking out his first target (though, as he puts it, "I like to think it was a defense, not an attack"). "Stopping The New York Times dead in its tracks was critical to the overall effort, because the Times sets the agenda for the broader media world," he says. "The knuckleheads in the ESPN newsroom - if you can call it that - stop playing Nerf basketball only long enough to read, it seems, comic books and the Times. They're simply one of the many lesser media outlets that float like a flotilla in the wake of the Times."

An added bonus was that much of the blogosphere is openly contemptuous of the Gray Lady.