Photogs refuse to sign consent form at prep event; papers don't shoot event

Right, Ace... I don't have as much of a problem with that.

In the Wisconsin case, the high school athletic association had sold the "rights" to sell the photos to some organization. They took that rights fee and presumably spent it on the kids -- or put it back into the organization for balls, gym maintenance, etc.

But the newspapers were saying they had a right to take a bunch of non-editorial photos and sell them. Athletic assn. said no they didn't, and based on the way it works with video, I believe they're right.

Why should the rules be different for still photos and video?

 

Yes, that's how I like to see us making coverage decisions ... by refusing access to those who piss us off.

 

Nothing wrong with web galleries, but selling those pics just posted online is wrong.
The web pics go from editorial to commercial when you start selling them. I don't know why this is so complicated. The state association in Louisiana signed a contract with a photo studio to sell pics. All they are doing is enforcing that contract.
The papers will lose this fight in court, if they take it that far.

 

Didn't the LPGA try to do this at the beginning of the 2006 season??

 

Update, courtesy of Romenesko:

http://www.nola.com/sports/t-p/index.ssf?/base/sports-29/117264669568750.xml&coll=1

Calling the matter a misunderstanding, Louisiana High School Athletic Association Commissioner Tommy Henry on Tuesday rescinded a policy that sought to block newspapers from selling to the public photographs taken at state athletic championships.

Most of the state's newspapers, including The Times-Picayune, refused to adhere to the policy and were banned from taking photos of the Ladies Top 28 Tournament. At halftime of the second game of the evening, Henry said he had relented on the rule that newspapers could not sell photos that appeared exclusively on their Web sites.

"We decided to stay with what was working," Henry said. "I will do away with the signatures for pictures, and (the photographers) can take the pictures they want."

 

I disagree. As said earlier, this is not a prom, a wedding or private party. Hire your photo studio if you want, but don't charge admission and advertise the event to the public.

It's news, and we're covering it, and if people want more than they get in the print edition or want to buy a photo from online, we'll provide that too. The LHSAA might have a historian too, but if I cover the state tournament every year and the paper decides it would be good to write a souvenir remembrance with stats, recaps and leftover notes and quotes that didn't fit in the print edition, you can bet we'd have every right to do that and sell it too.

With art.

 

That would sound to the reader like sour grapes, so I'd be careful with that tack.

 

Mr. Dangerously: I understand your point, but I don't like the general direction this is heading. I don't like these associations selling photo rights, but I'm not so sure newspapers should be hawking unpublished photographs on their websites, either. It seems sleazy.

The problem is, I'm not sure where it all ends. When will a newspaper say to a photographer: "Go out and shoot every wrestler in the state finals. We'll use something for the paper, but we want to make some extra money." I wonder how, or even if, the shooter benefits.

I'll admit I have a problem with this because these are high school kids. I think newspapers, in general, overplay high school sports because they are the only games in town and are inexpensive to cover. There is much less interest in the community than we'd like to think. (I can say this because I covered high school sports for many years.)

I used to want to know how many people go to high school sporting events who have no connection to the players or coaches. (My guess, except for big-time high school football games, is less than 5 percent, maybe even less than 1 percent.)

We're in business to make money, yes, and we're allowed to use unpublished material for a souvenir book if there's a market out there for it. I just don't like the idea of taking the material we deem unworthy of being published and selling it, especially when these are kids.

I like the idea of associations selling photo rights even less. It reminds me of when you go to an amusement park or a tour, and a photographer snaps your picture and tries to sell it to you at the end.

 

Yep. We always refuse the picture. The quality is no better than what I can get from a disposable point and press.

 

We emphasize preps more than most papers, but preps are big in our state, and we also have more pages than most sports sections.

As for "unworthy of publication," I think that's a misleading term. We get dozens of superb photos a night from a college football game. We might have room for eight. That doesn't make the others unworthy of publication.

 

Ike, I know for a fact that at my previous paper our photog took a billion photos at every event even before we started offering prints for sale. It's not like the editor was saying, "Get us some shots for the Web site." He would just shoot 100 photos at a game, remove all the ones which weren't very good, pick out one or two for the story, then upload half a dozen or so which were really good but which couldn't be published that day.

Not sure that I see what's so sleazy about it.

 

OK, "unworthy" might not have been the right word. I guess I should have identified them as the photos that weren't published. But they weren't published because others were better, or, I'd like to think, told the story in a better way.

I also should have asked how much most newspaper websites charge for these photos. If it's something nominal, maybe even something you download to print on your computer, it's not that bad. I'm old enough to remember the photographers at my first newspaper spending half of their day filling old print orders. I don't know if they even got a cut from that, but they should have.

Alley: I probably could have said this better, but I just don't like the thought of the pure commercial angle of this intruding on journalism. I worked at another newspaper that charged so much for a print that it wasn't worth it for most people to do (and, therefore, cut down on the print orders).

It's a lot easier to pass along photos than it used to be, and I don't want to see a publication turn journalism into some way to make an extra buck -- again, especially off kids. The people buying these photos aren't buying them for artwork. It's kind of a captive-audience deal.