It was a sticky June afternoon in East Peoria, and photographer David Banks was shooting the 2004 girls class AA state softball championship. Banks worked for the Daily Southtown then, and Lockport Township High School was playing for the title. He was the only press photographer there.
The revenue stream is pretty small—it didn’t come close to sparing the Southtown its recent drastic economies, merging with the Star papers and laying off a lot of people, Banks included. But visit the Web site of what’s now the SouthtownStar and you’ll see the paper means business. “Welcome to Southland PhotoShoppe,” it says. “Your shopping choices range from traditional prints to T-shirts, mugs, computer mouse pads and other items on which our photos are imprinted.”
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Hayes admits his revenues haven’t been declining from the competition, but he sees the papers’ current photo sales as the “tip of the iceberg.” “It just doesn’t seem proper to me,” he said. He paused, then contradicted himself. “It doesn’t seem improper. I guess if I was a newspaper I’d want to sell my pictures too. But then you’d have to respect the fact that the organization that’s sponsoring this event has hired somebody to do that.”
Hickman responded to Lyons’s bill with a statement warning of its “far-reaching implications”—not just “reducing our services or passing on increased costs to our member schools while newspapers and other news media profit” but also possibly ending live TV coverage of the championship football and basketball games. “If we can’t control the dissemination of the footage of these games,” Hickman says, “I can’t imagine why a sponsor would want to pay for TV rights and have anybody else come in and film and broadcast the same thing they’re paying for.” Jim O’Boye, president of KOST Broadcast Sales, which operates the IHSA TV Network, told me the same thing.
For more see Michael Miner’s blog News Bites at chicagoreader.com.
