Perhaps this should be filed under Never Underestimate The Courant’s Ability To Challenge Traditional Journalistic Ethics In Odd Ways:

According to UConn women’s basketball columnist John Altavilla, The Courant has hired Geno Auriemma’s daughter Alysa to blog about her father and his team.

“The Courant has retained her (fancy word for putting her on the payroll) to write occasional and original blogs, stories and participate in question and answer sessions for us during the season.”

Altavilla likens this to NBC giving a job to Jenna Bush.

Wha?

The Jenna Bush issue aside, given the Courant’s recent problems in the ethics department, doesn’t this seem uncomfortably close to paying for access? Doesn’t anyone on Broad Street wince at the idea that one of the state’s most newsworthy figures (Geno) has a daughter on the Courant payroll writing about him? How does that affect the paper’s other coverage? What kind of leverage does it provide the coach over the paper’s coverage, or, for that matter,  the paper over him? And what about the appearance of undue influence or coziness, even if there is none?

Has the Courant gone through the intellectual exercise of questioning how Alysa Auriemma’s hiring fits into the paper’s code of ethics; and, if so, how does it explain it? And, given its

recently damaged reputation, shouldn’t the paper explain its thinking to readers other than through Altavilla’s, I’m sorry, lame and false parallel with Jenna Bush? (NBC didn’t hire her during her father’s administration, or expect her to write about him or his “team”.)

True, both Geno and men’s coach Jim Calhoun have regular TV and radio spots, yet their other activities are covered by TV and radio news. But when was the last time a TV station questioned, for instance, a coach’s relationship with, say, Nike, or Monaco Ford? And, granted, a newspaper’s relationship with sports teams is a weird inter-dependent one in the first place, in some respects.

Perhaps the good thing about this new hire is that it opens other opportunities for the paper to hire bloggers with special relationships to figures in the news. How about a blog for Chris Dodd’s wife? Or  better still, maybe hire Rell’s chief of staff to do a “behind the scenes” report from the executive office, and perhaps a Q and A?

Note to Alysa: Please don’t take this questioning of the Courant’s decision-making as a reflection on you or your blog. In fact, my advice, as an old writer to a young one, is keep writing.  I think, however, you may find your deal with The Courant comes with some potentially uncomfortable side effects — and I’m not talking about complaints from your dad.