The music event, headlined by Sam Hunt, will not be covered by some members of The Post’s staff.
The Post will not have photos or videos of Saturday’s Country Night Lights festival, put on by Prime Social Group.
A reporter from The Post will cover the event.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Prime Social Group has a multimedia policy that is unnecessarily overarching. Signing anything that even remotely resembles that agreement would be a breach of our ethics as journalists.
A huge problem we have with this contract is the clause in the contract regarding continuous use of the content Post staffers create. The contract states the following: “Prime Social Group reserves the right to have any photos or videos taken at the event, by you or anyone else to be removed from the Internet and any other form of publication.”
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That is a direct violation of our journalistic integrity. Very few circumstances warrant a retraction of Post content, and having Prime Social Group say they don’t like the images we use certainly does not fall in that category. We don’t publish content someone else demands the right to take down.
The company also states in its contract that video media “needs to be approved by PSG before posting online.” We do not let any source or company we write a story about approve any aspect of content we produce. The exception is made for direct quotes, which can be read back to a source by a reporter if requested.
Last spring we first decided against sending our photographers to 13Fest.
We see no reason to visually cover events with similar contracts until the group quits asking journalists to sacrifice their editorial standards.
Editorials represent the majority opinion of The Post's executive editors: Editor-in-Chief Emma Ockerman, Managing Editor Rebekah Barnes, Opinion Editor Will Gibbs and Digital Managing Editor Samuel Howard. Post editorials are independent of the publication's news coverage.
