tim's experiment

Real confusion in this morning’s SCM Post. At first I thought it was a simple matter of the same story being used by the News people and their sporting counterparts. On A13 we had “Elvis has left the building, and image, to new owners”. Not a bad attempt at an interesting headline, though I did wonder why Hong Kong readers should be interested in 15 paragraphs on a change in the group of fat cigar smokers who have the right to make whatever money can still be made from the dead King.

On C11, in the sports section, we had “Ali joins Elvis on branding firms books”. Only seven paragraphs this time. Sports version is credited to AFP in New York, News version to AFP in Memphis. But wait a minute. If you examine the headlines carefully you can see that this is not the same story at all. The company is called Authentic Brands Group (ABG). The AP version – from Memphis – includes several other companies which need not concern us here, but the only actual quotes are from members of Presley’s family. And the gist of the story is that ABG has bought the rights to Elvis, which it did not previously own. Elvis’s afterlife was formerly the property of a thing called CORE Media Group, which is also to blame for American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance. There is no mention of Muhammad Ali.

In the AFP version – from New York – on the other hand  ABG already owns Elvis (and Marylin Monroe). Ali is the new acquisition and the rest of the story is about him. Elvis only gets a mention because ABG is introduced as “the company that owns licensing rights to Elvis Presley”.

So what the Dickens is going on here? Well don’t ask me – I only know what I read in the newspapers, which on this topic are not very helpful. The Guardian did not cover the story (at least  on its web-site, which is searchable). The BBC had the Memphis version, but it also supplied a link to the ABG website, on which the latest news was Ali and Elvis was not mentioned.

In the end one has to wonder, who cares? This posthumous branding rights racket is a peculiarity of American law, which is made by Congressmen most of whom are for sale, and benefits people engaged in the morbid, if not sordid, business of making money out of dead people’s fame. If this must be covered at all, shouldn’t it be on the Business pages?