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Football World Cup: news vs. entertainment, Europe vs. America Today is a very important day for the future of sport news. Because FIFA has accepted to remove all restrictions about online coverage - but not for mobile phones - of the Football World Cup (to be held in Germany in June 2006), there is now a major hope that the same scenario will happen for the 2008 Olympic games and that national sport leagues will limit their demands for restrictions.
What are the main lessons of this victory for press freedom against pure commercial interests: 1) all press organisations were united behind the World Association of Newspapers; from news agencies (AFP, Reuters...) to international organisations (ENPA in Europe), to national organisations such as ASNE, the American organisation of editors. When football is a major sport - as in Brazil or Germany -, news organisations also rallied and discussed the legal basis of so many restrictions.
2) football/soccer is considered as public news and not as "private entertainment". As journalists, we have the duty to inform, not to cover such events as the sponsors would like us to. Because sport is news, sport rights owners have limited possibilities to impose restrictions on the events' coverage. Without being schematic, every limitation can be considered as censorship, but until now commercial interests were successful to multiply restrictions . 3) The FIFA-WAN agreement will have great consequences on some European national agreements (restrictions on stories, photos, scores until the end of the match, sponsors' logos imposed in some pictures...)and maybe the NBA in the US. The WAN-FIFA agrrement is a great encouragement for all news organisations that are struggling against huge commercial interests: now there is a precedent and these organisations can say to sponsors and sport rights owners "why don't do act as FIFA?" 4) last conclusion is that the FIFA-WAN agreement can be seen as a successful European process (even if the stakes are worldwide). FIFA is based in Zurich, Geneva, with very strong European members and WAN is based in Paris, also with strong European members. The two organisations evolve in an environment where news values are still stronger than commercial interests and any lawsuit to a European court would have been very difficult for sport rights owners. I am not sure that if the negociation had occured in an American context the conclusion would have been the same. And now, what is the next challenge for news organisations? To get for the mobile phone coverage what was obtained for the web-online coverage. In the future, there will be no difference for any user, but at the moment mobile phone users will access to the FIFA World Cup real time coverage only through FIFA sponsors or licensed networks! Source: WAN-FIFA press release |
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