Sports pictures within news

There's always a trade off between safeguarding the exclusivity of your event and getting publicity for it by it being on the news. I think the Oscars have got it about right - their event is seen as exclusive and probably people who choose to pay to view it feel they're getting their money's worth, yet it gets huge (free) publicity on the tv news programmes which all helps to keep the event feeling big, A sport where things have IMO gone very much the other way is professional boxing, where its confined to expensive pay per view. Even news coverage seems to consist of stills a lot of the time. It's all added to making the sport seem almost obscure IMO. Boxing used to be a mainstay of programmes like World of Sport and Sportsnight.

Journalists have also a long-standing tradition of believing they can and should be able to use pictures from current events as it's 'Fair Use', 'Fair Comment' or 'Fair Dealing'. The lines are blurred however, when a celebrity guest might come into a programme like Breakfast in order to promote a new show on, say, ITV. There'll be publicity footage from the programme which ITV will happily provide in return for promotion and an on-screen credit, but naturally a production team will often want to include something from that performer's history, something like an archive appearance that for nostalgia's sake is nice to see again and talk about. What a lot of news teams struggle with understanding is that using that kind of stuff is not necessarily going to be free of charge!! It can be very difficult to properly clear stuff from the archives and ensure that you've paid the right royalties to the right people.

You'd also like to think that for something like a minute's silence everyone would grow up and just accept that anyone who wants access to it should have it, as it's marking such a tragic event.

Similarly, when Fabrice Muamba collapsed last year, ESPN's footage of wide-shots of the ground and crowd reaction as he was treated was available to the BBC to use in MOTD even though they were not an FA Cup rights holder - just a common-sense situation.

In happier circumstances, the pre/interval/post match shots from PL matches generally are more free for people to use. The BBC (certainly used to, and I imagine still do) cut to their incoming feeds of matches when there's no match action on to get crowd reaction, immediate reaction from players walking off, etc. And they most certainly aren't live rights holders. So I think that the PL are happy with FTA access to these non-match sections of live match day footage.

Surely it's more than three minutes - they show footage of most of the key awards being announced and snippets of the speeches. If it really is just three minutes the editors do a really good job of fleshing out the content, obviously helped by the red carpet reports at the after parties.

Yep, I've known a few cases where journos have assumed they can include clips from feature films in reports as incidental picture rather than in any context. It's not something a news programme would want or afford to clear, but it if they're lucky and it's recently come out on DVD then it can be done... with a caption promoting it.

I think you'd be surprised, 3 minutes is a long time in TV, more than long enough to 'wrap' an awards ceremony.

It does take some effort to do, although normally there will be a highlights reel of the ceremony released by the organisers for the media so they don't have to work from the whole thing