Mavs owner advises reporters (Photo by Austin Kilgore, The Daily Campus)

It wasn’t hard to tell when Mark Cuban arrived on campus Wednesday. The typically quiet hall outside Room 283 in Umphrey Lee filled with voices long before the 10-minute break between classes. And in the middle of the crowd was Cuban himself.

Wearing a black T-shirt with a drawing of Johnny Cash and the words “Cash rules – everything around me” and a pair of blue jeans, Cuban seemed like nothing more than an average guy, besides the fact that he owns the Dallas Mavericks has a way of dealing with the media that causes some people to love him and some people to hate him.

One thing that might make Cuban seem so “everyday” is his popular “Blog Maverick.” According to Mark, the blog gets over 2.5 million subscribers a day, and it’s all because of a reporter, Kevin Blackistone, from The Dallas Morning News.

It seemed Cuban loves telling the story, especially to Rick Stevens’ Technology Reporting class, a requirement for journalism majors that was at nearly twice its capacity on Wednesday.

“Blackistone emailed me,” Cuban said and launched into the story about how he and Blackistone had an e-mail conversation that Blackistone condensed into a story Cuban didn’t think was accurate.

“So what I did with my blog was,” Cuban said, “I just reprinted the entire email dialogue, verbatim, and I published it. And from his end, the shit hit the fan, because he thought it was all off the record. Yet, this was an on the record interview and it was my way of saying to the media universe, ‘You can’t have it both ways, and an on-the-record interview is an on-the-record interview.'”

This story gets to something that Cuban really knows a lot about – blogs and their importance to the media industry.

Cuban said in the brand new age of technology reporting, you have to be a user and a consumer who is aware as a reporter that, ultimately, one has to answer to someone, whether it is a company or an individual one is writing about.

“This is something that you guys have a unique opportunity to build into your repertoire and understand,” he said.

Even though Cuban is quick to point out the importance of blogs, he also recognizes not every blog succeeds. And, he has a theory about why.

“It really comes down to content,” Cuban said. “Is there something different there that adds value? You’ve got to be willing to convey something that really is personal; otherwise, it’s not gonna work.”

If the reporter isn’t creative, Cuban just refers them to his blog to get the answer to a question that he has been asked multiple times.

“Most reporters are lazy. They take the path of the least resistance. They don’t do their homework,” Cuban said. “You can definitely separate yourself from the pack by just thinking uniquely, being yourself, coming up with angles.”

But, don’t get him wrong; even conducting most of his interviews through e-mail doesn’t spare Cuban all of the headaches.”They can still abuse the hell out of me, but now I have a way to fight back,” he said.

Of course, since anybody can create and maintain a blog, there is always the issue of trust – how to gain it and how to keep it.

“Bottom line is, either I trust you or I don’t and that’s just based off my experiences with you,” Cuban said. He goes on to point out how some media outlets refer to themselves as the most trusted and then have to deal with an anchor that reports a false or misleading story. “Trust doesn’t really mean that much,” he said. “We all have pretty much the same access to information.”

The technology entrepreneur also noted that news and trustworthiness isn’t always what a media company is after.

“Every single major corporate network is owned by a public company. And, which comes first? Good news or good earnings? Good earnings,” Cuban said. He went on to say that the No. 1 priority of a general manager is to keep his job. As far as Cuban is concerned, it is the same with the heads of the news organizations.

“That’s the challenge, to be able to be unique, to be your own Hunter S. Thompson. To come up with your own “Fear and Loathing on the Technology Trail,” because that’s what will get people’s attention,” Cuban said. “If everybody around you is saying this is the way to approach reporting on a subject, then you know that’s the wrong way to do it. You might still keep your job, you might still get your raise and that’s exactly what you’ll have at the end of the day – a job and if that’s why you got into this, just a job – great, do it the same way as everybody else but if you want to be in a position where people say, ‘Golly, how the hell did she or he think of that, or where did that come from?,’ then go the opposite way.”

But, the talk wasn’t all about how to be a unique journalist in a world of journalists ready to follow the trend. In the end, Cuban couldn’t help but answer a question about Dirk Nowitzki’s position on the court. The class was probably all the happier for it. Because, at the end of the day, no matter how professional the students were in that classroom, they were all a little star-struck by the presence of Mark Cuban.