BCCI’s 8-point list of media don’ts for IPL

Giving the kind of brand equity cricket commands, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has been majestically proactive in protecting its rights (and the rights of rights holders) over the game.

Result: representatives of Cricinfo, which is now owned by ESPN, cannot file from the press box and have to watch the match from the stands, because the rights are with Star.

Result: news agencies routinely boycott coverage of matches, especially by way of pictures.

Result: a legend like Jim Maxwell of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) skipped the recent series because ABC didn’t have the rights.

With the Indian Premier League (IPL) around the corner, BCCI’s legal representatives (operating from the safe confines of a post office box number in Bangalore) have shot off letters to print organisations on the use of logos, trademarks, word marks and other “proprietary content”.

The eight-point list of don’ts is revealing:

Please be informed that, without license, your publication/s may not:

i.  use any or all of the IPL Names, IPL Marks and IPL Proprietary Content in conjunction with any advertisement, message, name, logo, trade mark or word mark of any third party;

ii. publish any article, match synopsis, match review, or snap-shot relating to the Pepsi IPL or any previous IPL seasons that uses any or all of the IPL Names, IPL Marks and IPL Proprietary Content in conjunction with any  unlicensed advertisement, message, name, logo, trade mark or word mark of a third party,

iii. publish any photograph that relates to the Pepsi IPL or any previous seasons of the IPL that is sponsored by any third party, or contain catchphrases that refer to any third party (e.g, “Entity A’ Moment of the Match”),

iv. publish third party sponsored or presented score-cards of Pepsi IPL matches,

v. publish third party sponsored capsules or tables containing fixtures, timings and/or venue details of Pepsi IPL matches,

vi. publish any syndicated column that displays any or all of the IPL Names, IPL Marks and IPL Proprietary Content and displays the name, trade mark, word mark logo of any commercial or non-commercial entity/entities,

vii. publish a special page, section or supplement relating to Pepsi IPL that displays any or all of the IPL Names, IPL Marks, and IPL Proprietary Content in conjunction with any advertisement, message, name, logo, trade mark or word mark of a third party, or

viii. publish still images by altering or deliberately removing, replacing or obscuring any logo of a sponsor of the BCCI-IPL, a participating team or a participating player;

Also read: How journalists are aiding the decadent IPL

Why the watchdogs didn’t bark during IPL loot

Why a unique newspaper isn’t covering the IPL

How come no one saw IPL cookie crumbling

The Times of India, India Times and IPL-4

How journalists are aiding the decadent IPL

The academic, writer and critic Mukul Kesavan in The Times of India:

“The IPL is, in media terms, such a honeypot, that the traditional distinction between pundits in the electronic and print media paid to comment on sport and the commentators contracted to describe and celebrate it on television, has dissolved. We have seen people wearing both hats without the slightest self-consciousness….

“The people who run the IPL and the journalists who cover it, seem to positively celebrate the fact that IPL teams are playthings of the rich and famous….

“When the governors of cricket in India begin to use female bodies to sell tickets and capture television ratings you know that a cricket tournament has lost its bearings and become something else. And when the journalists who enable the tamasha and the audiences who watch it begin to take the dancing girls for granted, there is a larger sickness abroad.”

Read the full article: Decadence and the IPL

Also read: Indian cricket reporters are too soft on cricketers

Why a unique newspaper isn’t covering the IPL

The Times of India, indiatimes.com and IPL-4

How come no one saw the IPL cookie crumbling

Why a unique newspaper isn’t covering the IPL

Parimala Bhat reads Sparshdnyan, one of the world’s few newspapers to cater to the visually impaired.

This week’s Sunday Guardian carries a story on Sparshdnyan, a newspaper in Braille for the visually impaired. Published out of Bombay twice a month, the 48-page paper is sent out to some 400 subscribers in Maharashtra.

The paper’s editor Swagat Thorat estimates readership at 24,000 copies per issue, most of them in the 18-35 segment  that advertisers love, but not surprisingly the paper gets no ads.

The editor tells correspondent Rick Westhead that he receives 600-700 letters each issue, and covers his Rs 30,000 per month administrative costs by selling wildlife pictures.

“We cover almost everything,” Thorat says, “but there are a few topics we don’t like.”

One, surprisingly, is India’s national passion: cricket.

“The paper we use is very expensive because it’s so thick for the Braille and I just don’t want to waste it on a topic that is covered in so many other places,” he says.

“I want to make sure we have more on things like science technologies, missions to Mars, and maybe more on India’s foreign policy.”

Photograph: courtesy The Sunday Guardian

Read the full article: Braille newspaper shows blind new world

Contact Sparshdnyan: sprshdnyan [at] gmail [dot] com

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Why the watchdogs didn’t bark during IPL loot

The kerfuffle in the Indian Premier League (IPL) has brought to the fore the conflict of interest that helped prevent the scams and controversies from being detected or reported earlier.

The former Somerset captain and cricket writer Peter Roebuck writes in The Hindu:

“Cricket tolerates widespread conflicts of interest.

“Besides taking seats on the IPL governing body, Sunil Gavaskar and Ravi Shastri also cover the matches on television. Doubtless they also contribute columns. In effect they are writing their own reviews.

“Harsha Bhogle assisted the Mumbai Indians. None of them is in a position to subject IPL to the scrutiny required by their media responsibilities….

“It may seem churlish to suggest they cannot have it both ways. Sincerity, though, is not the issue. Every estate has its part to play. As has amply been proved in India over the last few weeks, the media is the watchdog. All the more reason to insist that it is free to bark whenever it sees fit.”

Read the full article: Conflicts of interest abound in cricket

Also read: How come no one saw the IPL cookie crumbling?

Aroon Purie‘s rule no.1 in journalism: ‘There are no gods’

Look, who’s also in the IPL racket? An editor!

‘Dubai is a haven of information for journalists’

Dubai is a recurring theme in the ongoing tragicomedy in the Indian Premier League (IPL).

Shashi Tharoor, who has to give up his ministership, was a consultant with a Dubai firm before taking the plunge in electoral politics. His close friend Sunanda Pushkar lives there. The new head of the Cochin IPL franchise Harshad Mehta is a resident of the city. Etc.

Plus, there are is the betting and matchfixing angle with a Dubai edge.

K.P. Nayar explains in The Telegraph, Calcutta:

“For a journalist with a ‘nose’ for information, Dubai is one of the most open places in the world. Once a newsman has won the trust of an Arab, howsoever sensitive his position may be, he will share information with you which will be wrapped in multiple layers of secrecy in most other countries.

“In my decade-long experience in Dubai, people share information with trusted journalists in the full knowledge that it will not be written about — until after decades, as in the case of this narrative. Unless, of course, the journalist is seeking a one-way plane ticket out of the Emirate.”

Read the full article: The edge of a precipice

Photograph: courtesy Follow the money

‘Rule No. 1 of journalism: There are no gods.’

Three weeks ago India Today magazine put Lalit Modi, commissioner of the Indian Premier League (IPL) of cricket, on the cover with the line, “Billion-Dollar Baby”.

It puts him on the cover again this week, with the line “Run Out”.

Editor-in-chief Aroon Purie in his letter to readers, offers a muted mea culpa:

“Rule No. 1 of journalism: there are no gods. And if they appear to be so they usually have feet of clay.

“So it was with a fast-talking dynamic 46-year-old man who came from nowhere three years ago and became the god of cricket in India. This is none other than IPL commissioner Lalit Modi who is today embroiled in controversy.

“It is rare for India Today to fete someone on the cover for spectacular achievement and then put them on it within the same month for being in trouble. It was, however, inevitable as the IPL is not only a phenomenon that has revolutionised cricket but last week shook the government and led to the exit of one of its ministers.”

Also read: How come no one saw the IPL cookie crumbling?

The scoreline: different strokes for different folks

Look who is also in the IPL racket? An editor!

How come no one spotted the Satyam fraud?

How come no one saw the election worm turn?

How come no one saw the IPL cookie crumbling?

The collapse of the Indian Premier League (IPL) pack of cards is identical to the unravelling of the Satyam fraud in 2009, from a media perspective. Namely, no media organisation—newspaper, magazine, TV station or internet website—saw it before it happened.

Or wanted to see it coming.

The player auctions, the franchise bids, the television rights, the glitz, the glamour, the sleaze were all unquestioningly swallowed and spewed out with nary an eyebrow raised.

Just three weeks ago, India Today magazine was putting the the IPL commissioner Lalit Modi—now accused of conflict of interest, nepotism, shady deals, corruption, sex, drugs, betting, match-fixing, and worse—on the cover, with a couple of cheer girls.

Till a week ago, The Times of India was happily having it both ways.

So, did nobody see it coming? At least one hand has gone up. Former Outlook magazine* journalists T.R. Vivek and Alam Srinivas co-authored a book on the IPL’s marriage of cricket and commerce last year.

In an interview with rediff.com‘s Krishnakumar Padmanabhan, Vivek says the red flags were visible from the very beginning.

Q: As an observer of the IPL from the early days, did you see any early warning signs? If so, what were they?

A: The very fact that cricket was being taken ‘private’ in one stroke was a red flag for me. It was quite similar to the East European countries embracing unfettered free market economics straight from the lap of Communism without any necessary groundwork for the transition. I was in a minority when I first raised questions about promoter motives, and antecedents.

What do a Mukesh Ambani or a Vijay Mallya know about the game to become cricket entrepreneurs? Are they here because it is their passion, or is it because owning a sports property was cool, and it propelled their social status higher than the already rarified echelons?

The franchise auction process left a lot of questions unanswered.

Another red flag for me was whether the Board of Control for Cricket in India had the management bandwidth, execution capabilities to embark on a novel idea such as this.

* Disclosures apply

Read the full interview: ‘Modi tinkered with the rules all the time’

Also read: How come no one spotted the Satyam fraud?

How come no one saw the worm turn?

The scoreline: different strokes for different folks

Look who is also in the IPL racket? An editor!

Look, who is also in the IPL racket? An editor!

In his story on the burgeoning scandal in the Indian Premier League (IPL), Shantanu Guha-Ray, the business editor of Tehelka magazine, casually reveals how “the editor of a major Indian media house whose son had recently come under the radar of corporate intelligence bodies, is also trying to get into the IPL franchise racket.”

Image: courtesy Tehelka

Read the full story: The Indian Premier Leak

‘Perhaps, it is time for missionary journalists’

In a week in which the Hindustan Times front-paged the story of children eating silica-laced mud not far from Allahabad, and 76 soldiers were ambushed by Maoists in poverty-stricken Dantewada, the former Sunday magazine and India Today correspondent Madhu Jain laments the loss of “missionary journalism” in her DNA column.

“The words of my boss still rankle, decades later. ‘Look, forget all this missionary journalism. Nobody likes to read about poverty.’

“There was a major drought going on that summer in Rajasthan. I had just returned to Delhi after over a week in the remotest corners of the state—barely a stone’s throw from the Pakistan border— on the trail of famine deaths.

“The government of the day was almost going blue in the face denying famine deaths. But I had found several such incidents, mostly children who had died after successive years of malnutrition — heart-rending stories, each one of them. Yet, nobody seemed interested. My story didn’t make the cover….

“Poverty is also not a sexy issue for the media — most of the time that is. These days they are mired in the hullabaloo over Sania-and-Shoaib. They are obsessed by the IPL, Indian billionaires, the clichés of India Shining. And, of course, the Page 3 syndrome and the most trivial of pursuits of the inhabitants of Bollywood.”

Read the full article: A call for missionary journalism

The Scoreline: different strokes for different folks

The second season of Indian Premier League (IPL), the shotgun wedding of cricket, cinema, celebrity, cheesecake, and commerce, is now into its second week in South Africa, but its influence is alrady being felt not just on the way cricket is played but on the way cricket is covered on the sports pages.

The table, above, is from the 29 April issue of the New Delhi edition of The Times of India.

It carries the names of four of the IPL teams as christened by their owners (Mumbai Indians, Kings’s XI Punjab, Knight Riders, Royal Challengers) . But, mysteriously or perhaps not so mysteriously, it refers to the other four teams by their cities (Hyderabad, Delhi, Jaipur and Chennai).

ToI’s reluctance to name “Team Hyderabad”, which is owned by Deccan Chronicle, is somewhat understandable: it may not want to give “free publicity” to a  key competitors in the South. But what of the remaining three? The Chennai team is owned by India Cements; the Delhi team by the infrastructure company GMR; and the Jaipur team is part-owned by Lachlan Murdoch and the actress Shilpa Shetty.

Should business interests prevent newspapers, magazines, TV stations from naming teams owned by competitors? Even if business interests prevent ToI from naming teams, why the preferential treatment for the other four?

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