The college football community and the nation’s news media, kindred souls for more than a century, are breaking up over coverage rights and rules.
And, like the messy ending of a longtime marriage, there appears to be no quick solution to the difficult issues driving them apart.
Those issues are digital in nature, and revolve around the fast-changing way the public receives and pays for information and entertainment on television, the Web, mobile phones and other electronic devices.
Newspapers and broadcast stations have historically enjoyed a cozy union with college football. Access and coverage were facilitated under the mutually beneficial theory that publicity informed the public and also helped drive fan interest, including ticket sales.
In recent years, however, the Internet, with its myriad online tentacles, has slowly developed into a new frontier of unexpected revenue. But only if prized content is tightly controlled.
Thus the Big 10, Big 12, Southeastern Conference and other major sports leagues have served notice they now consider their brands and content, including game action, valuable property rights, subject to restrained use by the media.
This parrots the position of Major League Baseball and other professional sports that sell subscriptions to online content, particularly streamed audio and video accounts of game action and interviews.
The idea is to increase the monetary value of the online content by restricting its use in much the same way live broadcasting of athletic events and sports shows are sold to particular radio and television stations.
Specifically, the colleges and their conferences have crafted strict conditions for issuing press access credentials to broadcast stations and newspapers, their partners in publicity since the first intercollegiate football game between Rutgers and Princeton on Nov. 6, 1869.
The new rules still encourage traditional coverage in the old media, but they limit use of content online and over time. Photos, audio and video cannot be shared or leveraged for commercial gain beyond conventional publication. And they cannot be archived for reuse and resale at a later date.
Real-time reports, including blogging, of game action are forbidden.
There’s even the astonishing suggestion that the colleges, and not the news organizations originating sports coverage, hold the copyright to the work product of reporters, photographers and cameramen assigned to cover the teams and games.
Legal experts believe this provision conflicts with laws and court precedent that convey copyright license to the creators of content and not to the sponsors or hosts of an event open to the public.
David Tomlin, a lawyer for the Associated Press, said there’s no question about the intent of the big college conferences in issuing stricter press credential rules. He said they are devised “so the leagues can run their own publicity machines, make money and control their message and brand.”
The consequence for fans, he said, “is less opportunity to see independent, objective exposure. The leagues will cover themselves.”
But not without objection -- and possible court challenge.
Six of the largest journalism groups in the country have banded together to protest the football coverage restrictions, expressing their objections in letters to the conferences. There’s also talk of legal action if revisions aren’t made.
Big-time football has long been the biggest beneficiary of sports coverage by the news media in this country. But the tug-of-war over press credentials threatens to make combatants out of the comrades that made the game so popular.
That’s something the conferences and colleges should keep in mind as they consider the news media’s request to let journalists do their job in the digital age the way they’ve done it in the past.
William B. Ketter is vice president of news for Community Newspaper Holdings Inc., an Alabama-based media company with news outlets in 150 communities. Contact him at wketter@cnhi.com.
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A fight over college football coverage rights
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