News agencies set to ignore IPL

	Lalit Modi: "There are no issues" © AFP

The Press Trust of India (PTI) has joined international agencies in calling for modifications in the media guidelines for the Indian Premier League, failing which they have decided to ignore the event.

PTI's reluctance to accept the terms and conditions will no doubt come as a big blow to the IPL, considering the reach that the agency enjoys across various Indian publications. "We have not applied for accreditation [the last date was April 10] because the current terms and conditions are not acceptable to us," VS Chandrashekar, an executive editor with PTI, told Cricinfo. "We will cover the event only if the media guidelines are changed."

The Indian Newspaper Society, a representative body of newspaper publishers, also joined in the chorus of voices against the media guidelines. The INS has noted with disappointment that the "revised" media accreditation terms put out by the IPL do not constitute a significant improvement over what was put out earlier and have in fact failed to address the issues of intellectual property rights of the media as well as press freedom, INS president Bahubali Shah said in a release.

Meanwhile, the IPL is sticking to its guns. "According to us there are no issues. We have had a formal discussion with all parties concerned, and they had agreed to the drafted guidelines," Lalit Modi, the IPL commissioner, told Cricinfo when asked about the news agencies' threat to ignore the tournament. "We have had 1200-plus applications [for accreditation] till last evening.

Despite the IPL releasing fresh terms and conditions after vociferous protests from the media against its original guidelines on accreditation for the event, news agencies are still left high and dry because they are prohibited from selling photographs to websites.

The News Media Coalition, the umbrella body that has under its wings global news and photograph agencies Reuters, Associated Press, Agence France Presse and Getty Images, had expressed deep concerns about limitations on access imposed by the IPL.

Barry Parker, AFP's South Asia bureau chief, stuck to his earlier stance and it is learnt that Reuters and AP, the two other major international agencies, were also of a similar view.

Modi had an almost two-hour meeting with representatives of various media in India on Monday, and all parties announced later that they had removed most of the bottlenecks. Even then, some of the contentious clauses remained, including the ban on selling photographs and the bar on representatives from websites covering matches.