The Washington Capitals are leaders in building a big tent for new media. We want as many people and sources to cover us as possible. I just saw an interview with Ron Wilson, our former coach, on the NHL channel where he was bemoaning that while he was coach in DC, at some games, there were only one or two reporters covering the team.

Today after some games, we can have more than 100 people covering our team. The proliferation of media is exemplified right there and most of the new sources are based on the web and are bloggers, portals and folks who are part of new media networks.

We believe the more tagged content about us out feeding the algorithms in the sky, the better for us. The more pixels generated, the better for our fans, our franchise and our business, too.

However we do have partners that pay us lots of dollars for our media rights. They pay for exclusive rights to broadcast games in audio or video format.

As this article notes – click here to read it – what happens when a blogger shows up at a game with a video camera and broadcasts the game in real time and then tries to sell ads around it? Yikes. That would be a big issue and would create a huge conflict for us and for our partners. It also would be cheating the Washington Capitals out of a revenue stream, a stream of cash we need to improve the team; pay the players; and pay for the in game experience.

This is all about the power of our copyright and our IP. We will be very diligent in threading the needle here and embracing and extending editorial coverage for the new media but working very hard to protect the rights of our paying partners.

This conflict will bear watching and I am hopeful people will be cognizant of these issues and act in a responsible and fair manner.