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NUJ hits out at Notting Hill Carnival’s press accreditation fees

By Chris Cooke | Published on Thursday 20 August 2015

Following all the chitter chatter about the unreasonable demands made by certain artists of photographers given photo passes to their shows, now organisers of the Notting Hill Carnival have been criticised for charging journalists and photographers £100 for press accreditation, and for demanding that any resulting coverage be shared with the organisation.

According to The Guardian, the Carnival’s accreditation form stipulates that applicants must “share their blog, video, article, write-up, recap, review or coverage of the events attended within three weeks of the conclusion of the event”, and that the Carnival’s producer can then use that content on its own websites. Foreign-language journalists must even provide an English translation.

Obviously press can always access the Carnival as a member of the public without accreditation. But paying the £100 fee and committing to the content-sharing terms gets journalists access to an observation tower and press area. Justifying the new terms, the London Notting Hill Carnival Executive Trust says they are “necessary to create the right manageable conditions and make suitable arrangement to enable the promotion of the event”.

However, the National Union Of Journalists encouraged its members to boycott the new accreditation scheme, pointing out that freelance journalists not guaranteed any publication of their work may well be out of pocket for trying to cover the event. And such freelancers likely can’t commit to give the Carnival rights to republish their work anyway, because any publications that they subsequently sell coverage too would have an opinion on such repurposing of articles.

The NUJ’s John Toner told reporters: “It is not acceptable that the media are expected to pay a fee to cover what is a genuine news event. It is equally unacceptable that the organisers expect pictures and video to be supplied free for their commercial purposes. For an individual freelance, this could mean working at a loss. We see no reason why freelances should be expected to subsidise the Carnival. We would urge all members to reject these conditions, and to cover the event from public spaces”.

For a time, a number of music festivals starting charging journalists a fee for accreditation, albeit usually in the form of a charitable donation. Though doing so ignores that many music journalists are freelance, operate on incredibly tight budgets, and shell out a load of their own cash anyway to travel to, and eat and drink at, the events they are covering (expenses many music media are unable to cover for their journalists).

And major events risk losing decent coverage if they go this route, because few media have budgets for such fees in this day and age. And commercially speaking, a pre-written top ten list about the event, compiled without actually attending, is likely to get as much traffic, and therefore generate as much ad income, as having a journalist, or team of journalists, provide proper on-the-ground coverage.