US Open Cup and citizen journalism

Jason Davis at Matchfit had a great post letting out a lot of frustration about how the US Open Cup is treated by MLS, USSF and the media in general. I can’t speak for MLS or USSF, but the frustration with the media (maybe not Jason’s, but the frustration by soccer fans) is I think a bit misplace.

A tweet by Josh Hakala made me think of something this afternoon. For better or for worse, the best website for following the Open Cup is not managed by a large media outfit or USSF, but a bunch of guys that just love the tournament. This is pretty common throughout American soccer, that sites like Goal Seattle and Prost Amerika, while amateur operations, do a much better job than established media.

While in our soccer world, we’re complaining about the lack of media attention to our great tournament, tradition media (at least print, but also radio and television) are contracting and limiting their attention.

This isn’t really the time for us to expect organizations that are already losing ground to expand coverage to a sport they’ve never seriously considered in the first place. And, now, the expansion of soccer will most likely be the greatest sport expansion during the citizen journalism era. For a long time, we’ve known that soccer is the sport of the internet.

While we know this, we’ve complained that we haven’t gotten the attention from traditional media, instead of rejecting that we need the shrinking traditional media and thrown our attention to building our own fan/citizen based media.

So, long story short. I hope the new US Open Cup website has plenty of opportunity for fan input, citizen coverage of games and great community stuff like that.