Peter Williams: Sports and media scrap over cash for pictures

There is, as they're prone to say across the ditch, a right old blue going on between certain sections of the Australian media and the country's most powerful sports organisations, the AFL and Cricket Australia.

The AFL is steadfastly refusing to allow photographers representing news agencies Reuters and AAP to take pictures of its games and distribute them to newspapers, magazines and websites. That battle has been festering for close to three years.

Similar scraps have affected news agency coverage of international cricket in Australia in the last two seasons and there were nearly all sorts of problems at the last Rugby World Cup.

At issue is the technology of the digital age, how it's used, how much money can be made from it - and who should be making that money.

The media organisations, which once just published newspapers and magazines, now want to provide continuing coverage of an event with words and pictures, both still and moving. Where previously a newspaper cricket reporter might file one story at the end of a day's play, now he provides almost continuous coverage for immediate publication on the paper's website.

It's the same with photographs. Up to date images are constantly displayed and previous ones are archived forever.

The result is that many sports bodies think websites run by media companies now go well beyond mere news reporting and create, in the words of a submission to an Australian Senate inquiry into the issue, "a portal of content which can be commercialised." The sports bodies think they should be the ones to commercialise that content.

But media companies look at sports organisations' "official" websites and retort that if sports bodies can get into the media business, then they should be able to get into the sports business. The lines between the two positions in this on-line era are incredibly blurred.

The Senate reported in May after hearing 44 submissions over three months. In the end it took a laissez faire approach, didn't recommend any legislation on the issue, but was quite equivocal that reporting of sport is in the public interest, and the principles of freedom of speech and access for journalists should be upheld.

But the AFL continues to ignore the Senate report and refuses access to news agency photographers. It is happy for them to distribute pictures supplied by the AFL's own photographer, a company owned by a mate of the AFL chief executive. AAP and Reuters, quite rightly, see that as a loss of editorial control and won't have a bar of it.

The issue is relevant in this country because of the impending Rugby World Cup. There were major issues before the 2007 tournament in France when the IRB threatened to restrict visual material transmitted to websites each game, before editing, to just 40 images per half, instead of an unlimited number.

When influential outlets with online vehicles like The Sun, The Times and the Guardian of London and France's L'Equipe threatened to boycott the tournament, and then actually did skip the launch of a promotion by major sponsor Visa, the sponsor and the French government strongly suggested the IRB should relent. They did, grudgingly, only fuelling the fire by suggesting in future that media outlets might have to pay to cover IRB events.

Sports bodies are feeling the economic pinch as much as everybody else at the moment and need to maximise income from as many sources as possible. The IRB is holding off doing many broadcasting and sponsorship deals for 2011 until things improve.

Don't be surprised if the issue of what can and can't be put on newspaper websites during the World Cup flares up again during negotiations in the next couple of years.