Media rights consultant Andrew Moger tells an industry forum that journalism has been 'sleeping for too long' on rights issues
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A consultant responsible for representing news media organizations in rights negotiations with international sporting events told an industry forum that journalists had become complacent in their dealings with large events on rights issues.
Speaking at the Journalism Leaders Forum , at UCLAN last night, Andrew Moger, managing director of MM Consultancy, said that sporting organisations has become emboldened and in some circumstances 'aggressive' in their dealings with the news media and that a new 'robust' approach was needed from news organisations to safeguard objective coverage of large sporting events.
Moger cited Cricket Australia's recent attempts to take the intellectual property rights of all content from journalists working on their grounds as evidence of how large sporting bodies were attempting to curtail established press freedoms in pursuit of ever greater commercial revenues.
"I [also] recently met the broadcast officers of UEFA, I can't say it was a particularly pleasant meeting, to do so would be a lie," Moger said.
"They want to control absolutely the way the outputs of the print media and the international agencies were going to operate during the Euro 2008 during the summer."
He told the forum that prior to last year's Rugby World Cup, where he represented the Newspaper Publishers Association and coalition of other news media groups in rights negotiations, the International Rugby Board (IRB) had initially held a similar set of demands, attempting to limit the amount of digital coverage news groups could provide readers and viewers online.
Leading international news organisations - including Getty Images, Reuters, the Associated Press Agence France-Presse (AFP) and German agency DPA - called a boycott on all IRB events and press conferences in the run up to the tournament in protest to what they saw as a pernicious set of guidelines and then intransigence on the part of the IRB as it refused to bend to demands of greater access and coverage.
In the face of a impending news blackout the IRB was then forced into an 11th hour climb-down, conceding to demands and agreeing to further talks over future rights as the tournament got underway.
The attitude that pervaded the International Rugby Board prior the event, Moger said, was replaced by a more mature one after the boycott.
"That was a birth pain that we had to go through," he told the journalism forum.
Moger was asked by the chair of the forum, Charlie Lambert, how worried the sports journalism industry should be about the changing relationship between it and large sporting bodies.
"As journalists we are letting ourselves down, we are letting a great industry down if we don't man the barricades [against restrictive measures]," Moger said.
"We have been sleeping on this issue far too long. That includes publishers, owners and sports editors. We have tried to maintain relationships in the face of competition and control and we need to be much more robust on our own account."
