Cricket Australia says cricket isn't news

When you watch sport, are you watching news or entertainment? Well, both, of course. But the distinction is becoming rather important, in one regard at least: for sport fans, cricket books may soon have far fewer photos in them. It’s like the melting ice caps: you may not care now, but just wait till all that reading text starts lapping at your doorstep, and you can’t find a picture to turn to.

According to the International Publishers’ Association, Cricket Australia is trying to get photographers and their agencies to sign a new contract before they enter Aussie cricket grounds. The new contract says that only CA can authorise the sale of pictures to book publishers. This means that a photographer would essentially be signing away the book licensing rights to their pictures before they’ve even taken them.

Note that the IPA is not objecting to paying for the pictures. Book publishers already pay to include pictures in their books, but they pay the photographers and agencies who took them, not the sporting body. Just like they pay Reuters for that picture of Zuma in full cry, and not the ANC. And you can bet your Shane Warne voodoo doll that Cricket Australia will be a pain in the ass to buy a picture from, when compared with photographers and news agencies.

Quite apart from that bureaucracy, which is every publisher’s nightmare, here’s a critical distinction: if something’s news, we want an independent photographer to shoot it for us. That’s what makes it look like news. And if photographers can sell their work to whomever they like, they’ll do it better and more often. If it’s entertainment, on the other hand, then it really doesn’t matter who took or owns the photograph, because the entertainment value is in the photo itself, not in what it depicts. No need for an independent photographer; just send in the marketing department. Movies, plays and art are already treated like this most of the time. (If I want to put a painting in a book, for instance, I have to get the right to do that from the artist, the gallery and the art’s owner before I even get to the photographer.)

By trying to take control of images of its sport, Cricket Australia is taking a sad step towards turning cricket into entertainment. And no matter how entertaining cricket is, we really need it to be news, or it’s a whole lot harder to justify five days in front of it.

This isn’t a new approach by a major sporting body. It reminded me of a fabulous piece in the New Yorker back in 2001 by Louis Menand. In this piece, Menand takes on Major League Baseball for wanting greater control over the rights to images of its baseball games. Menand makes this brilliantly simple point: if sport were entertainment, it would be covered by critics, not analysts and reporters. And we’d have entirely different ways of evaluating it.

Six years on, I’m not sure what’s happened in baseball since the MLB made its move. But whatever Cricket Australia gets away with, it won’t really change the way we watch cricket. It will always be news. But us sport lovers may have to learn to read more, and spend less time flipping to the pictures.