“…go to the Lakers Web site and you can watch almost nine minutes of interviews after yesterday’s practice with a number of Lakers as well as Jackson. These are the same interviews that the beat writers are getting their quotes and information from, but you can watch them unfiltered.

“After going to a few practices and hearing the conversations first hand I was surprised by how different they came out in the next day’s paper,” said Ty Nowell, Website Content Manager for the Lakers. “Our beat guys do a pretty good job of staying true to what is said, but there’s still so much that can get lost in the translation, so we started posting the raw audio on the site for everyone to listen to.”

Now the Lakers post video a few hours after every home practice and game (plus some road games), and Los Angeles is far from alone. Almost every team now has full time writers for their Web site and also are putting up some video, all of this aiming to do what the Internet does best - tear down walls of separation. Team sites are adapting to the Web in a way that newspapers and most other traditional media are not right now.”

It’s good for fans that teams have more content but if there is a market for it on the team website there is also a market for it on newspaper websites. I’d view that audio and video posted alongside the analysis of beat reporters if it was available but if it’s not I’m going to read less coverage because I only have so much time. If the NBA team websites are scooping the press with the full interviews, why WOULDN’T I read the team websites instead of things like ESPN, HOOPSWORLD, and Yahoo! Sports?