FIDE Journalists' Commission

In 2012 FIDE General Assembly : Whither the World Championship?, I excerpted from the minutes of FIDE President Ilyumzhinov's annual report to the FIDE minions. Another topic of specific interest to bloggers in general, and to me specifically, came near the end of Ilyumzhinov's report.

Our Agenda is very big, therefore let me shortly comment on several other issues. I have been approached on several occasions regarding the refusal to issue an accreditation to one Russian journalist, and there even open letters in this respect. I addressed the Head of the Organising Committee with a request to carefully consider this issue and I would appreciate Ali's [Nihat Yazici] comments on this.

On one hand, we should not interfere with the media members to carry out their work which is very necessary for us, we should not veto to a profession, but on the other hand, it is necessary to regularize the process of accrediting those who are real professional journalists, who do not disseminate speculations and information which has not been checked, and those who are aware of professional ethics.

Therefore I task Mr. Georgios Makropoulos and M. Khodarkovsky to create a special commission, comprising, first of all, journalists. And, to close the topic, I request that this journalist be issued an accreditation badge.

Later, in the section titled '16. Events Commission', is another mention of the subject.

Journalists' Commission. Mr. Makropoulos said that there are bloggers who claim they are journalists, if they open a website. We want all the people who want to act as chess journalists, to be registered within FIDE, they will have a right to be accredited in all FIDE events, they should decide the basic principles that should be followed. FIDE will try with the Organisers to arrange their facilities, hotel discounts etc.

FIDE President mentioned Mr. Makropoulos and M. Khodarkovsky who have worked as professional journalists and Ms. A. Karlovich, as for the second woman, Mr. Makropoulos proposed Ms. Marinello, and we will try to do the job of registering media members.

General Assembly approved the proposal of Mr. Makropoulos.

This reminded me that while working on my first post for the topic, 83rd FIDE Congress, I had transcribed further remarks by Makropoulos; see 2012 FIDE Congress - EB Meeting Part 1 [Youtube.com] at 22:55 into the clip.

Kirsan asked me to prepare a proposal. He wants to create a new commission for journalists -- facing the problems that we have many times -- in order to register officially journalists, because we don't know who are journalists and who are not really journalists in the chess world. Because the truth it is not journalists everyone who is writing something in a web site. We want also that these people who are working on the web sites and who are writing about chess somehow to have some recognition by FIDE, as people who are working as chess journalists.

So we have on the one hand all journalists that they are registered with their official associations of journalists in their own countries or international associations because of course all these people they should be automatically registered [to report on important events(?)]. And we have many others who cannot provide any official recognition that they are journalists but they are working on many web sites in the world or in chess magazines.

We will try to organize all these people, register them within FIDE. We will try to provide help for them for their work, facilities during the events, special discounts, if it is possible, for their hotels and accommodation and at the same time we would like that these people by themselves to create a minimum understanding of principles how they should work, because most of them they never have been real journalists, they never have finished any school, journalist or university, and we know how many problems there are. How many times just because they don't like somebody they can insult him and nothing is going on. I'm not talking about insulting [me(?)], insulting everybody, officials of federations.

So we would like somehow to bring these people, speak with them, decide what is the correct way to go with this effort of being a chess journalist. And at the same time to help them, to make sure that they will have the right support, they will be always accreditated [sic] and if we can also help them to get better discounts, let's say, for traveling and hotels, then we'll do our best. So this is the idea, so we would like that the Board here will accept the creation of these three commissions -- the two that Nigel [Freeman] proposed -- so we fully recommend to the [General] Assembly and Kirsan he will present the names of the chairmen and members of these commissions. Is there any comment here?

I'll wait and see what FIDE proposes before passing judgement on the idea. And, no, I haven't forgotten Larisa Yudina.