FIDE's Journalist Commission 2018

Of all the topics flagged in Spectating the 89th FIDE Congress (December 2018), the one I like best is following the chess journalists. After the 88th Congress we had FIDE's Journalist Commission 2017 (December 2017), and this year we have annex 58 to the 89th Congress, titled:-

Commission of Chess Journalists (CCJ) meeting
30th September 2018

The chairman was FIDE's outgoing Deputy President, G. Makropoulos (GRE), and the secretary was A. Karlovych [Karlovich; both spellings are used in the document] (UKR). Also present were 17 journalists representing 13 federations, including three attendees from both Iran and Norway. The first order of business was:-

1. The Secretary gave a brief report of the activities in the previous year.

The main accomplishment was 'Media Regulations for the FIDE events are completed and included in FIDE Handbook (Section C.09.)', i.e. Handbook :: C. General Rules and Recommendations for Tournaments :: 09. Media Regulations. This appears to be a straightforward copy of the document discussed at the 2017 meeting, typos and all ('FIDE Wolrd Cup'). The minutes also noted,

The number of FIDE accredited journalists with FIDE Membership Cards is nearing 50. The Commission should work to increase the number. Iran is the national chess federation with the most FIDE accredited journalists. The number of journalists accredited by the Organizers of the Chess Olympiad is around 150.

The second order of business was:-

2. The Secretary informed about the Subcommittee decisions on FIDE Journalists awards for the year 2017.

In a nutshell:-

• Best chess news website : ChessBase
• Best national chess federation website : Turkey
• For the year 2016, two television houses : NTV (Russia) and NRK (Norway).

The third order of business was:-

3. Miscellaneous

This amounted to a dozen suggestions by participants, e.g. 'the media is a key to securing the sponsorship and therefore it is important to introduce more journalists to chess', 'sponsors expect x3-5 of investment returned through media exposure', and 'regular journalists do not want just the games results -- we should be able to prepare attractive content for news agencies'.

The future of the CCJ is not clear. In last month's post on FIDE Commissions 2018, I speculated that the group's name was changing to 'Media Commission'. Neither group is mentioned in the 'Commissions' section of the FIDE Directory, (fide.com), or in a recent announcement about the composition of FIDE Commissions (ditto). The handbook section of A. Administrative Subjects :: 02. Non-Elected Commissions, lists 'Media Commission (MSM)', but there is no further information. Later this year, when I report on the 90th Congress, perhaps there will be nothing to say on the topic.