Team won't let you take your own pictures? Replace them with cartoons!

Posted this on the soccer thread, but I think it's entertaining enough to deserve one over here too. A newspaper in England was denied permission by a third-division soccer team to take pictures at the first game of the season. The paper in question covers the away team, but it would appear that no photographers are to be allowed apart from the official club photographer, with papers forced to pay for the pictures that he/she takes.

So what did the locked-out paper do? Hired a cartoonist to produce images of key moments in the game.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-10914863

 

Outstanding!! Hope it sold more papers.

 

I'd say don't cover the games. Newspapers in Utah did that to a minor league baseball team after it tried to dictate how they should call their stadium (team was involved in naming rights dispute with the college who owned the park).

 

Love the cartoon idea. Brilliant.

And Stitch, I doubt ignoring the team is an option. You can get away with it when you're talking about minor league baseball, but probably not in this case. And besides, I think the cartoons do a better job of thumbing your nose at the policy than ignoring them ever could.

 

I'm with PC.

 

Didn't an American paper, in a dispute over photo rights, run stick figure drawings in place of action photos?

I swear I remember that, but I don't remember where it was.

 

Yeah, you're definitely right. It may be third tier, but it's not like skipping a high school game. This is the biggest game in town.

 

Hey, I like it.
It's old school. That's how it was done before the easy use of photos anyway.

 

I like it, too. It makes the best out of a bad situation and adds some serious novelty to the newspaper's coverage. The cartoons might actually sell some papers.

A lifetime ago, when I was the sports editor at a midsize paper in a major market, we were fortunate enough to have an extremely decent artist on the graphics staff. During the course of spring training, I sent him out to the stadium at various times and asked him to cover that day's game -- and the atmosphere -- with his sketch pad in his own unique way. He brought back great "snapshots" of the scenery: the guy slugging the game-winning home run, the father and small son eating hot dogs, the manager leaning on the dugout rail and frowning, etc. Just some old-time throwback newspaperin' stuff, and the readers loved it. I'm told we sold more papers on the days the drawings ran. But do it for every game? I think the novelty would wear off very quickly.

Cheers to the Plymouth Herald for turning something bad into something pretty damned interesting.

And cheers to whichever U.S. newspaper had the moxie, the personality, the gumption -- and, yes, the balls -- to run stick-figure drawings when they were turned down for photos.

When a newspaper picks its battles and knows the proper time to stick its finger in the eye of those who deserve comeuppance, it's a beautiful thing.

 

Either stop covering the team or cover them without photos with a tagline at the bottom of the story explaining why. Perhaps a column challenging the silly team stance.

 

Again, this is a visiting team paper, so it'll only come up once this season. What the hometown paper is doing, I'm not sure. I don't particularly care for the home team in question.

 

The Sun piles on in a tremendous show of journalistic solidarity.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sport/football/3086603/Opposition-0-Plymouth-1.html