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Saturday, Nov 10, 2007
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Cricket Australia branded as greedy

AP, Reuters and AFP have not covered the first two days of the first Test
Indian tour of Australia begins in December

BRISBANE: Cricket Australia was branded un-Australian and greedy for its part in a media rights dispute that has journalists from the three major international news agencies locked out of a match against Sri Lanka.

The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse have not covered the first two days of Australia’s season-opening test here on Thursday and Friday after refusing to accept the conditions of accreditation.

Among the news agencies’ main concerns are Cricket Australia’s insistence that they pay for the right to license photos of its events to editorial users, and curbs on distribution of news and images to online news publishers.

CA also is asserting an intellectual property interest in stories and images produced by journalists at its events.

The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, which represents more than 10,000 journalists in Australia, said CA’s conditions were “greedy.”

Basic issue

“News coverage should not be up for sale; that is the basic issue at stake here,” Chris Warren, the Alliance’s federal secretary, said in a statement.

Cricket, “has weathered successive waves of technological change, but one thing hasn’t changed: People want to read about our cricket team,” Warren said.

“CA needs to remember that a Test match involving the national team is a public event and news about it should be freely available to the public,” he added.

After continued failed attempts to work out a solution through a global media coalition, The AP issued a statement against CA’s “arbitrary and self-serving restrictions.”

Pay to cover

AP associate general counsel Dave Tomlin said CA was basically demanding that we pay them for the right to cover and distribute news about cricket.

“We don’t pay news sources for the right to hear and tell their stories, and we don’t pay organisers of newsworthy events for the right to cover them,” he said. News Ltd., Australia’s largest media group, agreed to a watered down, revised terms offered only to domestic media only after an apology from Cricket Australia for comments its public affairs manager made about its motives for covering the game.

Robert Craddock, one of Australia’s leading cricket journalists, noted Australian Communications Minister Helen Coonan’s comments about the conditions being “not Australian and not cricket” in a column for Brisbane’s Courier-Mail on Friday.

Image at stake

Craddock wrote that cricket’s image was at stake.

“One of the worries with this dispute is that it will impede overseas coverage of the sport with major wire services boycotting the first Test and unsure of their plans for the summer,” he said. CA chief executive James Sutherland said he was hoping to resolve the issues “and get back to the business of staging and reporting cricket.”

A similar dispute between the International Rugby Board and a coalition of the international news agencies and major news organisations that threatened to overshadow the World Cup was resolved only an hour before kickoff of the tournament in September.

There was no late change this time.

The subcontinent angle

And with India scheduled for a four-Test series starting December 26, newspapers across the subcontinent could be without photos of two key series.

“Australian cricket is regarded as the gold standard internationally,” Warren said. “With the Indian team arriving, backed by the world’s largest cricket audience, it would be a disaster if this dispute was not settled quickly.”

New Zealand’s main newspaper publishers have already contacted Cricket Australia saying they will not pay any license fees to cover next month’s three-match limited-overs series between Australia and New Zealand. — AP

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