GolfWeb must toe the line

The growth of golf websites, and the battle for dominance, has led to strange goings-on in the marriage of the two biggest players, PGATour.com and GolfWeb - so much so, in fact, that the newly merged site (under a deal which gave PGATour.com GolfWeb's editorial content and GolfWeb access to realtime scoring of tournament events) has witnessed a number of stories critical to the tour being killed.

CBS SportsLine, the owners of GolfWeb, paid the PGA Tour an upfront licensing fee of $8.5 million to cover a five-year period. The deal was announced in April and relaunched last month when officials from both organisations gave the impression that GolfWeb would maintain its journalistic freedom and have the autonomy to publish stories as it saw fit.

Things haven't quite worked out that way - and three top journalists, Stu Schneider, the GolfWeb executive editor, and columnists Michael Mayo and Lorne Rubenstein have resigned recently. Former GolfWeb employees said they felt they could no longer exercise journalistic freedom because of the Tour's influence, overt or otherwise.

The problems came to light recently when news broke about John Daly's return to drinking and the site's editorial staff had to seek the approval of PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem before posting it.

But there have been other occasions too in which the US Tour has allegedly exerted its influence:

An Associated Press story commenting about how the Ryder Cup was a better event than the PGA Tour's Presidents Cup was never published.

the headline "Tiger Outshines Duval" was changed because the Tour didn't want to highlight one player at the expense of another.

A column written by Tom Weiskopf about the Ryder Cup and Ben Crenshaw's reaction to player compensation was dropped because the PGA Tour wanted to put the controversial issue behind it.

"Everybody was walking on eggshells because nobody knew what was allowed and what wasn't," said Mayo. "When I sat down to write, I found myself saying, `can I say this or can I not say this?' That's no way to be a journalist."

What seems to have happened is that the PGA, who had the most accessed site on the web but which viewed GolfWeb as its nearest rival, adopted the old approach of "keeping your friends close but your enemies even closer" in agreeing to the merged site. Now, it seems, they are also dictating editorial policy which means no criticism of Tour players, even after the excesses on the 17th green at Brookline during last month's Ryder Cup.