You have got to be kidding!…

Especially in photojournalist you have to be very motivated today. Before it gets better it gets worse. And that means that you have to live on the financial minimum and struggle until the market has thinned out again. I know so many really gifted photographers ( and that is not just talking ) that struggle every month to get their things into publications. Quality is sometimes so much better than what is shown by “established” photographers, but in the end its still a business that decides who you are by who do you know ( thats also a fact we can’t deny ).

And maybe the profession of “the photographer” is dying out and if you wan’t to make it your profession you have to pay the price.

As for reports of Time magazine sourcing free Flickr images, if true it bears all the hallmarks of a cost cutting initiative. How will this initiative increase its appeal to both readers and advertisers?

If anyone can get the same content for free on the web than why should they bother paying for Time magazine? And why should advertisers invest in a medium that is reducing its differentiatiation?

Actually, no. When you upload a picture to license you pick what sort of rights you reserve on it. You can set a default, so all uploaded pictures have the same license. By default, it’s set to “All Rights Reserved” but there are a lot of reminders about the existence of Creative Commons licensing. Unlike facebook, though, there’s no forfeiture of rights involved with using the service.

Couldn’t Flickr just contract with Time or any other publisher/media to use any photos posted on their site. Even get paid, without compensating the photographer?

Wake up and smell the coffee- how sustainable is an industry where the newbies that come in are constantly giving their work away, so much so that when the newbies get old they can’t pay their mortgage because no one pays for photos anymore?

And Tom Coates what is it exactly you mean by ‘inscrutable position’? And what names have I called anyone? I have expressly said in this post ‘I am not decrying amateurs, as every professional started as one’…This is precisely what I mean by people being photojournalists because at least that have the nous to get their facts right!

If you can present meaningful answers to those two questions then maybe it would loan your argument some credibility.

I live in the era of “Amateur is the ‘new’ Auteur”

Oh boy…that line is going to get old real fast. I’ve heard it a few times and as more publications switch to being only online or less frequent print schedules (US News and World Report, the Christian Science Monitor, and soon to be more I’m sure) I don’t know how any will be able to sustain their journalism without paying.

“We can provide a photo credit, and I can send you a screenshot. We’re working with little, next to no budget…
I’m afraid the going rate is the credit–no fee. This is because we are not producing any print publication, only online…”

Hmmm, what to do, what to do!

Well said Tom. I imagine it’s hard being a new photographer if this is the welcome wagon they can look forward to.

To followup on my previous comment 1 week ago, I received an email from Time saying my photo had not been selected for the final run for the specific edition.

I agree that posters after me that it’s one thing to be a “professional” and another to complain (and whine) about not being treated like one. Not everyone will value the work you do. Surround yourself with positive people and focus on the warm glow of awesome.

————————
Dear XXXXXX,

We finished our flickr project, which will be featured in the 12/29 issue. Unfortunately, your flickr posting did not make the final cut, but we would like to thank you for your participation, encourage you to keep shooting, and wish you the best of luck!

Again, thank you very much,
Time Magazine
————————

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1866936,00.html

On the other hand the stock industry is totally screwed.

Yes, the technology enables a perceived levelling of the playing field, but it’s unfortunately not that simple, much like the line between amateur and professional isn’t clear. I was part of a team that curated a show called “we are all photographers now” last year, and one of the most striking examples of this we found was Noah Kalina’s Every Day video. Now, it’s formally very amateur-ish. It’s grungy, shot with a webcam, etc. It’s also shot by someone who at the time was a student at SVA, and knew exactly what he was doing – I’d for example consider it totally impossible for him to not have been confronted to Nicholas Nixon’s Brown Sisters. This places the work in a different context, which changes its meaning. A similar kind of shift creates, in my view, a problem when you translate it to photojournalism, not because of the moot amateur/professional debate in itself, but because of a set of regulations that separate professional from amateur photography in the very specific context of journalism. For example, since the playing field is so leveled, what, other than institutional legitimation, would Yahoo need from Reuters for YouWitness ?

I’ll also add i’ve got a tremendous problem with the smugness of the crowd-sourced discourse. The paradox of the “citizen reporter” is that it plays into a game that is threatening a pillar of the democratic system. It is not, contrary to what the freetards seem to want to believe, the game itself (which has a lot to do with the dramatic dysfunction of the institution). But the long-term cost of the ego-boost could be tremendous, which is why I don’t think it’s a good idea to play into it.

The rest of your position here is sort of inscrutable to me. The truth is that you’re going to have to deal with this state of affairs. A mass of photographers aren’t going anywhere. Complaining about it and calling them names isn’t going to help. And if magazines look at the photos produced by amateurs and decide that they capture something that’s important (which seems to me to be very likely) then that’s going to have an impact on your business. You can shout about it all you want, you can be angry about it, but it’s not going to change anything. And—more importantly—it’s not a reflection on the people who take the photos, who are still passionate, enthusiastic who do it for the love and are delighted when they get any recognition.

As to your point about the amount of crap there is out there, well that too is the way of the world. And the job of technologists and engineers and web designers is to find techniques to surface the good stuff and make it easier to explore around. It’s happening more and more every day. Again, you can be dismayed by this, you can worry about your industry, you can think it’s all a disaster, but that’s not really going to change things. So probably the best thing to do is to work out how to use these tools yourself to push and promote the work that you do – or (as I said earlier) make some proactive move with the press to change the way they buy photos. I don’t see you really have many other options.

All requests I am aware of for photos for the story are to do with the election of Obama – my guess is that the story is not about flickr but about the major events of the year.

I am not decrying amateurs, as every professional started as one, but I am soooo sick of hearing about ‘amateur’ being the next harbinger of news…

For god’s sake, just because you have a camera doesn’t make you a photojournalist….

As does, just because you have a spanner doesn’t make you a mechanic…

And really all the plethora of people carrying cameras around doesn’t improve the state of photography in general, it just increases the amount of crap you have to wade through to find the gems…

That being said, look at it this way: Get better, take this as a challenge. Improve your craft, every shot you produce should make everyone else who views it look at their camera gear and portfolios in shame and disgust and give you the greatest compliment one photographer can give to another, they can simply ask you “How did you do that?”

The thing that worries me about this conversation is how negative some people have been about Flickr and the people who post photos there. People are talking about their ‘nothing photos’ and decrying them for being amateurs, saying that they’re destroying the industry.

I just want people to look at *one day* of Flickr explore and tell me with a straight face that some of the captures posted aren’t professional quality. Not all of them are, certainly, but then not all of the best pictures reach Flickr Explore either.

I mean just glancing through the last 24 hours I find these:
http://flickr.com/photos/awkgame/3103909397/
http://flickr.com/photos/jung_n_freud/3104881938/
http://flickr.com/photos/sonnysaguil/3103776671/
http://flickr.com/photos/yy-z/3104750529/
http://flickr.com/photos/thedarlinglife/3106453346/
http://flickr.com/photos/lindsaystark/3104102147/

Now, that the availability of photos on Flickr is going to have an impact on the rest of the industry is, I’m afraid, pretty much undeniable. But that’s not only true of photography – talented amateurs all over the world have access to the technology and a platform to the world for showing off what they can do with it. It’s true for animation, film-makers, comedians, writers and journalists, graphic designers, t-shirt designers etc. etc.

In general this is *not a bad thing*. This is a great, transformative, positive thing that means that creative enthusiastic people get to express themselves, reveal themselves to the world, find work and opportunities. And for those professional photographers who feel like they could accomplish more in the world, these same opportunities are there for you. And from the perspective of the audience, they’re seeing more and more quality views of the world—more created work—all the time.

But yeah, it probably means that the number of people who can make money despite not being that good—or by not pushing themselves into new areas—is going to diminish. Conceivably people who do great work may find it harder to support themselves by doing it. I have sympathy, but this has happened in hundreds of different industries already.

You want to do something about it, start a campaign – protest in public and get high profile talent engaged. Declare that you’ll go on strike and not produce imagery for magazines unless they agree that a person should be rewarded for the photography that they produce. That would be a positive step for all concerned. Shouting at someone who has a desk job, but loves photography, and gets the opportunity to have one of his photos featured in Time magazine is not a reasonable option.

Newsday has eliminated all fotog positions
http://nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2008/12/newsday.html
and I don’t believe this will be the only publication to do so in the days ahead

I do see professional PJ’s posting on Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zoriah/
Zoriah, who you mentioned and featured in a post here has been posting for some time, I read comments here and the thoughts/feelings about the social networking and public gallery site, Flickr, and cannot understand the disdain…I see Flickr only furthering the appreciation and passion for photography in every part of the globe, which can only be a good thing IMHO.

If magazines, editors, etc., want to utilize every avenue out there & available to them sobeit, not to pay someone though for their work, be it professionally derived or by an amateur is completely absurd.

When the car came along and replaced the horse and buggy people could not come to grips with that change for quite some time…when digital photography and the websites that followed came along people welcomed it w/ open arms, but now I see some are worried becasue it may/is affecting their pocket books, or perhaps their egos more, that may be the problem.