By Francis Moran
The news last week that major international news agencies, including Reuters and Agence France-Presse, were going to boycott the news conference launching this year’s Cannes film festival in a dispute over restricted access to the festival’s fabled red carpet is an uncomfortable but not wholly unexpected consequence of both the blurring lines between the editorial and commercial departments of large media conglomerates and of the recognition that there is still a lot of money to be made from news content — at least, from certain kinds of news content.
Here’s the back story. The fabled film festival, which is the world’s largest and this year runs from May 12 to 23, signed a sponsorship deal with French broadcaster Canal Plus and with European pay-TV company Orange, a subsidiary of France Telecom. The deal, part of a growing trend by media properties to extract more than just exposure from their sponsorship of events, gives the two sponsors a level of exclusivity over video footage from the red carpet, where the world’s stars and starlets preen for the attention of paparazzi as they arrive for screenings, and from news conferences, where the stars and directors of the movies meet the world’s journalists covering the festival. The festival has said that other news organizations would have restricted access to these venues for video-shooting purposes. The world’s largest wire services, which are well paid to serve up this video to their clients around the globe, have cried foul.
I’m not sure they should be.
I realise that media outlets, especially reputable media outlets, have always maintained opaque Chinese walls between their editorial and advertising departments but many of them in this modern era have been tearing down those walls themselves. The trend is most advanced in broadcast, where, for example, hundreds of millions of dollars are paid every two years for exclusive broadcast rights to the Olympics. An unchallenged outcome of this is that while non-sponsoring broadcasting companies can certainly cover the games, they accept that they will face restrictions on camera placement and access to athletes, and quite severe limits on how much they can actually broadcast.
Not all that much different from what the Cannes festival has imposed.
I suspect the news agencies are crying foul less out of wounded journalistic ethic and more out of a hit to their bottom lines. You see, event organizers like the Olympics and, now, Cannes have figured out that the pictures media companies acquire at such events are worth a lot of money. And they want a piece of this action. I believe we will increasingly see event organizers charge the media for access to this valuable content.
In a way, this has long been established practice on election campaigns, where journalists who want to travel on the leader’s plane or bus must cough up substantial amounts of money to cover the costs. While nobody would ever suggest this is any sort of cheque-book journalism, it does lock out the less-wealthy media organisations and, thereby, make more valuable the stories and pictures that those with access publish and broadcast.
As I said, I’m not sure I object to this trend. While the purist in me is concerned about a world where media have to pay for access to events and the implications that holds for media freedom and other vaunted values, the realist (cynic?) in me is obliged to concede that most media today are indistinguishable from any other commercial enterprise, producing and packaging the product they know will sell while leaving aside the stuff they know won’t.
Why shouldn’t they have to pay for the raw material?
[tags] Cannes, Olympics, journalism, cheque-book journalism, media ethics [\tags]
