News

Cricket Writers help secure coverage deal with ECB

The England and Wales Cricket Board, the governing body for the game, will pay for PA Sport to provide coverage of the county cricket season, for a second successive summer.

County cricket
County cricket games, in one-day and four-day formats, are guaranteed proper coverage this summer

The ECB stepped in last year when PA Sport announced it would be cutting its coverage, impacting the work of around 20 freelance stringers who had previously provided match updates throughout the day’s play, scores and reports on the 18 first-class counties.

Mark Baldwin, the chairman of the Cricket Writers’ Club, welcomed the decision to extend the arrangement into the 2015 summer. “I am very pleased to confirm that independent, eye-witness reporting of all county cricket matches will continue in 2015, funded by ECB but distributed – as for the last three months of the 2014 season – in the normal way by the Press Association. In essence, regionally based cricket writers will be employed to supply PA with match reports.”

The CWC has been key in the negotiations to secure the work deal. Baldwin says that the agreement “is in the best interests of English domestic cricket and its promotion to the public”.

Baldwin said: “I would like to congratulate ECB for getting to grips with this potentially serious issue, and for taking steps not just to protect county cricket coverage in the wider media but to enhance it. The ECB action … makes certain that regionally based freelances will continue to attend every day of every domestic match played in the English summer. Their words will be read regionally, nationally and internationally.”


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