MSHSAA needs to change before it starts hurting student-athletes

The Missouri State High School Activities Association's Media Advisory Committee conducted its first meeting June 11.

Interestingly, this was not a meeting that was publicized very well to the media -- before or after.

The only pre-meeting notice for the Southeast Missourian was received by our managing editor. It was a request from a Missouri Press Association representative for issues and concerns that should be considered or discussed at the meeting.

The only post-meeting notification of what took place at the meeting came from the MPA, at my request, in advance of last week's Associated Press Sports Editors national convention in St. Louis. At this convention, some time is set aside for sports editors from the Midwest to meet. This included representatives of four other Missouri papers besides the Southeast Missourian, including the state's largest papers. Only one other person in attendance had an idea of the Media Advisory Committee's existence or its first meeting.

The MSHSAA panel includes representatives of newspapers in Columbia and Springfield. The St. Louis area is represented by a TV sportscaster. Some radio stations have members on the committee. The Southeast region, for whatever reason, has no representative on the panel currently.

The committee's existence could be a good thing as MSHSAA works to tackle its problems and issues. The group's mission statement reads:

"The mission of the MSHSAA Media Advisory Committee is to provide media members an avenue for maintaining and promoting a positive relationship with MSHSAA administration and membership by advising the MSHSAA staff of how media are affected by current or future policies."

The committee made three other motions that have been passed along to the MSHSAA board of directors, though they really read like suggestions without ramifications.

• First, MSHSAA member schools should recognize space needs of the media in the press box or elsewhere in the facility and make reasonable accommodations.
• Second, host administrators should make reasonable and appropriate efforts to accommodate photographers and videographers.
• And third, schools should be cognizant of publicized start times for district and playoff games and abide by them, especially when those schools attempt to start games early. The Southeast Missourian staff ran into that situation with at least two playoff games this baseball season that started about 10 minutes before the hour.

The committee will have bigger issues to look at in the coming months. Primary among them is photography rights.

Since the 2003-04 school year, MSHSAA has had a contract with Columbia Photo to photograph state championship events and sell those photos on its Web site.

Thus, MSHSAA has prohibited other entities -- including newspaper Web sites such as Semoball.com or Semissourian.com or the St. Louis Post-Dispatch subsidiary that provides extensive high school coverage for Stltoday.com -- from the resale of photos that are not published in print. The MSHSAA credential form says the organization owns the rights to images from the state tournament events.

As the sports editor of the Southeast Missourian, the policy has been of great concern to me over the last three-and-a-half years.

And similar photo rights fights are taking place around the country.

In Wisconsin, the state's newspaper editors and publishers took the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association to court to protest nearly identical conditions. The WIAA has contracted with two companies for photo and video rights. It told two newspapers to stop reselling videos and a newspaper was told not to sell photos from its online state track gallery even though the WIAA's vendor did not cover the event.

The WIAA tried a compromise of selling fees to newspapers for images, but newspapers have countered that they will not pay to cover an event.

In Louisiana, newspaper photographers who showed up to attend the girls basketball state tournament were required to sign a credential form limiting the sale of photos to only those included in the newspaper, which is the MSHSAA's intended policy, although some photographers have interpreted it to mean all images. In Louisiana, the photographers left the event without signing, leading the Louisiana High School Athletic Association to change its policy.

The contention by newspapers is that state associations are failing to view Web sites as natural extensions for news presentation. The Web has infinite space rather than the limits of the newspaper, so we have the opportunity to publish dozens of photos from an event that we cannot publish in print.

The state association wants to limit entities that attend state events for the sole purpose of taking photos for resale. That's certainly within its right.

But MSHSAA is going too far in protecting its business relationship with Columbia Photo. The association has personnel devoted to media coverage that should review state credential requests to weed out Web sites that are valid news organizations from those who are photo-reprint services and issue its credentials accordingly.

Continuing to operate as it currently does may lead to measures that ultimately hurt those about whom the association should be most concerned -- student-athletes.

Toby Carrig is sports editor of the Southeast Missourian and semoball.com