Jahreszeiten Publishing In Germany Attempts Massive Rights Grab From Photographers

Freelens, the largest group of photo journalists in Germany issued a notice a few weeks back that Jahreszeiten Publishing was forcing all photographers to sign a contract without the possibility for negotiation that would grant them ownership rights to all photographs taken in the course of an assignment.

“Should photographers sign the agreement, they will be left with absolutely nothing – not even the possibility of marketing their works later in the form of archive photographs. This is because the contractual clauses are intended to secure free-of-charge use in all print and online objects of the publishing house. This would make untold publications possible for many years, in return for only a modest work fee that merely covers single, non-recurring use.”

You can read more on their blog (here).

Or better yet sign the petition (here).

The Griffin Museum of Photography 2009 Focus Awards

To say that my jaw hit the floor when I received an email from Paula Tognarelli, Executive Director of the Griffin Museum of Photography announcing that I would be getting an award is an understatement but the level of shock I felt then could only be called mild compared to the near catatonic state I was in as I stood on stage at the 4th annual Focus awards after they had just honored industry titans Modern Postcard and handed out thick glass award trophies to Russell Hart, Executive Editor of American Photo Magazine a man who might have ended this sentence long ago and then Rosalind Smith a local writer who received a standing ovation. I had just spotted DOP Kathy Ryan in the Second row who was here along with Director and Founder of Visa Pour l’Image Jean-François Leroy to honor the next recipient, Eliane Laffont, editorial director Hachette Filapacchi Magazines and founder of Sygma Photo New Agency, with a lifetime achievement award.

Eliane, by the way, gave a moving acceptance speech on the power of photography and photojournalism in particular where she recounted a poignant moment in her career and really it probably relates to a turning point in the business of photography when Corbis bought Sygma and the new contracts came back and they had changed “photography” to “content” and “photographers” to “content providers.” She concluded by saying although things are looking bad now there is so much great work being made in the world and as long as photojournalists believe, photojournalism will exist.

I wanted to say how cool and original it is that they built an award around the idea that they “honor the work of those who are not photographers but who have been instrumental in building greater awareness of the photographic arts in the general public.” The museum itself is very cozy and from what I understand they have excellent programming. If this award is any indication of the type of out of the box thinking they’re going to continue with in the future then they will become, if they haven’t already a strong voice in the photography world. Actually, the fact that Jean-François would fly in from Europe and Kathy would come up from New York for this one night is a pretty good indicator that they are already a strong voice.

From what I understand Lou Jones our MC for the evening came up with the idea for the award and I’m told by other photographers in the community he really works hard to educate himself and those around him about the future of photography. I was also told there was intense debate around my nomination (and others as well) but nearly everyone I met said they don’t read blogs so I’m guessing there’s handful of young photographers who work with the museum who nominated me and I want to say thanks.

I’m not so much an advocate for blogging as I am for simply doing things online where I strongly believe a great portion of the business of photography will end up. I think blogs are a great way to strengthen the community, to debate new ideas, to stomp out old bad ideas and to find a new path for photography but it’s more important that people working with photography are putting work online and trying new things out to help us all figure out what’s next. I did manage to say in my speech that I believe in the future of photography and that I would like to convince those that have the power to make decisions over the use of photography that there is no greater medium for communication online and once they finally realize this there will be a big bright future awaiting all of us.

APhotoEditor Is Picking Up An Award Today

The Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston has their Focus Awards tonight and they’re giving APE the Rising Star award. I’m incredibly honored that they would recognize this blog and just want to say thanks to all the readers, especially the people who take the time to leave a thoughtful comment on a post. It’s been an education for me and it’s really what makes this blog great. Thanks.

Any profession is in constant, ever-changing negotiation with “Free vs Paid”

But there’s only so much that “New Media” can do. At the end of the day, good art is still an expensive, labor-intensive, pain-in-the-ass thing to make. Technology may remove a specific barrier to entry – the way photography did to portraiture over oil paint, for example – but the good stuff, the stuff people are willing to pay BIG MONEY for, still remains really, really hard.

via An Interview with Hugh MacLeod, Cartoonist | Lateral Action.

Inexpensive Website Hosting For Photographers

UPDATE: 3 days and Joerg is still down. He’s got a temp site up (here).

Joerg Colberg’s weblog Conscientious has been down for over a day now and I wanted to let any of his regular visitors know that he’s down but not out. Apparently his webhost is MediaTemple which kind of surprises me because they have a good reputation and charge you more than most for the ability to handle traffic spikes. Still, things do happen and even a 99.9% uptime guarantee means you could be off the air for at least 9 hours a year

My experience with the cheaper hosting has always been that you will see outages from 15 minutes to an hour now and again but never anything like a day unless they have a fire or flood or some “act of god.” The bigger problem with cheap hosting has always been that they can’t handle the traffic spikes when you get mentioned on one of the big aggregator sites like slashdot, boingboing or digg. And, it’s not just your site that’s susceptible either, because you’re in a server with hundreds of other websites so if someone in your box gets “slashdotted” you’re going down too. Incidentally they way to prevent a server crash from too much traffic is to make an html page of whatever it is that people are linking too and serve that up instead of the usual pages which probably have 10 or 20 elements that need to be delivered for each visitor.

If anyone has suggestions for good cheap hosting I can make a list. I’ve used bluehost.com and know people using godaddy.com and both seem decent.

BlueHost $7/month
GoDaddy $5 – $15/month
Oditech $10/month
Yahoo Small Business $10/month
DreamHost $10/month
Tiger Tech $7/month
Site 5 $8/month
NearlyFreeSpeech Pay as you go
HostSite $10/month
ICD Soft $6-10/month
Certified Hosting $5/month
Host Papa $5/month
PowWeb $8/month
HostGator $15/month
WebHero $7/month
LaughingSquid $8 – $14/month
Pair $10 – $30/month
SurpassHosting $4 – $15/month
Eleven2 $6 – $21/month — Maybe not good. A commenter is having serious problems.
LiquidWeb $15 – $25/month

Finding A Better Business Model

Free is not a business model. Free is how you smash old crappy monopolies and how you force businesses who don’t give a rats ass what their consumers want to pay attention. Free is how you get some momentum so you can prove there really are better more efficient ways of doing some things. Thanks to YouTube I can now watch TV on my computer (Hulu) and a premium video streaming service exists (Vimeo).

Jason Pontin, Editor in Chief and Publisher of Technology Review delivers a brilliant manifesto with a plan to save media (here).

“For many decades, publications were overdistributed to readers who didn’t really want them, because publishers were former ad salesmen who hoped to profit by charging advertisers the highest possible rates.”

[…]”Editors can charge readers for content that is uniquely intelligent; that relies on proprietary data, investigation, or analysis; that helps readers with their jobs, investments, or personal consumption; or that is very expensively designed. Everything else should be available free…”

Chris Anderson, Editor of Wired has been working on a book about free that’s set to launch this summer (here), but I suspect he’s going to take a real thrashing on this one since it seems the tide has turned on free. All anyone is talking about these days is subscriptions, premium upgrades and advertising. All have free components to them it’s just not a big deal anymore. We know that if someone charges money for a product and you offer that same product for free you will attract more people. If you don’t have a way to make it profitable it’s called a trust fund not a business.

Here’s what the red hot Economist has to say on the matter:

“Ultimately, though, every business needs revenues—and advertising, it transpires, is not going to provide enough. Free content and services were a beguiling idea. But the lesson of two internet bubbles is that somebody somewhere is going to have to pick up the tab for lunch.” More (here).

And finally if you want read a fantastic analysis on the situation facing three largest business magazines all founded at the beginning of the modern era of magazines read 24/7 Wall Street’s: The Sun Sets On BusinessWeek, Forbes, And Fortune.

Paying For Media

I think we will eventually arrive at some kind of micro payment/advertising business model for online media in the not too distant future. Ideally there will be a common payment system on the device I use to access media or some kind of accepted everywhere pass. Either way it only works if the transactions are in the background.

The subscription model for Newspapers and Magazines that I’d like to see would allow me access to all the headlines and blurbs for each story but limit the number of full stories I can see/read each month/week depending on how much I’ve paid.

The cost for these subscription models is critical. I would read 1 story a month from 10 or 20 magazines and several stories a day from a couple different newspapers but not if it costs hundreds of dollars (based on current subscription prices). I think there could easily be ways to lower the subscription cost if I agree to watch and interact with special advertising or allow cookies to be set on my browser so the advertisers can follow me around and gather data. I can also envision a 2 year multiple magazine/newspaper subscription model where just like cell phone companies the media reader is free or significantly discounted.

One concept that publishers will struggle with is how efficient blogs and social networking are at distributing stories and bringing in new readers, because once you put a pay wall up that will end. The key to this is realizing that hits are worthless and loyal readers are valuable. I think there’s a way to allow your paid subscribers the ability to distribute full stories to their friends/audience along with embedded advertising and a pitch to subscribe. This kind of sideways distribution is critical for niche publications and they will need to find the balance point between content that is freely distributable and content you have to pay to see.

Of course none of this addresses the the most critical issue Magazines and Newspapers are facing right now. Most of the content is not worth paying for. Fixing that will require either a heavy investment from publishers or a changing of the guard.

This Overfed, Over-Monied Art World

This overfed, over-monied art world, Saltz explained, was a self-replicating machine: people think that “the art market is so smart that it only buys the best work…[but in reality]…the art market is so dumb that it buys anything other people are buying.”

[…]Prince, he suggested, “invented a dangerous idea and packaged himself for the corporate boardroom.” He posited that the major premise of Prince’s art was appropriation, and that it was “the idea that ate the art world.”

via NYFA Current saw it on Conscientious.

Infamous Copyright Thief Perez Hilton Issues Take Down Notice

Oh, the irony and hypocrisy… It appears that celebrity gossip blogger Mario Lavandeira (aka Perez Hilton) who rose to fame for his mean spirited commentary about celebrities and his blatant disregard for the copyright of the images he posted on his site has come running and crying to the copyright police. He issued a takedown notice to YouTube over a video with footage of him someone lifted off his blog (that looks to actually be fair use).

Copyrights & Campaigns blog has the story:

Perez Hilton né Mario Lavandeira may be the unlikeliest copyright enforcer on earth. The blogger rose to fame by posting photos of celebrities — without permission from the copyright owners — and defending himself from the inevitable lawsuits by claiming that his crude scribbling of penises, cocaine, and semen on the subjects’ faces rendered his conduct fair use.

Well, the times they are a changing. Lavandeira, who has morphed into a gay-rights activist, has now issued his own DMCA takedown notice over a TV ad posted to YouTube by the National Organization for Marriage, an anti-same-sex-marriage group. The ad still available on NOM’s web site focuses on the recent Carrie Prejean/Miss California USA imbroglio, in which Lavandeira played a starring role. The 30-second NOM spot uses about 3 seconds of footage from Lavandeira’s video blog where he says of Prejean, “She’s a dumb [beep], OK?” As NOM describes its spot:

The ad highlights the efforts of same-sex marriage activists to silence and discredit pro-marriage advocates, calling them “liars,” “bigots,” and worse.

Copyright? What Copyright?

But because Google are uppity little nerds who consider the world as theirs to metatag, they decided to scan them all, regardless of legal status.

Arm-in-arm with librarians, Google declared they would have 15 million books digitized in under a decade. In other words, almost half of the 32 million books that humans have published.

via newmatilda.com.

You’re Going To Pay For Information That You Want

Q: What’s the future of print media in the Internet age?

A: If you’ve got ink on your hands, which means that you’re a print person, you’re finished. These news-gathering organizations depended upon being the only place in town. And everybody has advertising now. So, it’s a very tough transition.

You’re going to pay for information that you want. And you’re going to pay directly, which means there’s going to be either micropayments or subscriptions. Advertising in the new world order can’t support much of anything. Therefore, you’re going to have hybrid business models that are going to have subscription revenues and other types of revenues.

We’re going to have professional news-gathering operations. I do not think we’re going to be a world where we’re going to have citizen reporters doing all of the work. I think that it’s going to be a really tough period, it will get worse, and then I think it will come out the other end by being supported by other revenue streams.

via CEO Forum: Media mogul Diller – USATODAY.com.

SPD Photography Award Nominees Online Now

I love seeing incredible photography in a well designed page. In the end the design can make or break the impact of the photography. There’s some great designers out there but it usually comes down to whether or not the editor will let them do their thing.

You can see some of the photography nominees for the SPD awards on their grids blog and I think they will put a few more up next week so check back:

Service Feature, Story

Section, Series of Pages

Section, Single Page or Spread

Trade/Corporate

Educational/Institutional

Service Feature, Single or Spread

Photo-Illustration

Redesign

kratochvil

spin

National Magazine Award Winners – Dora Somosi, Brent Stirton and Platon

PHOTOGRAPHY
This category recognizes excellence in magazine photography. It honors the effectiveness of photography, photojournalism and photo illustration in enhancing a magazine’s unique mission and personality.

Winner: GQ: Jim Nelson, editor-in-chief; Fred Woodward, design director; Jim Moore, creative director; Anton Ioukhnovets, art director; Dora Somosi, director of photography, for August, November, December issues.

PHOTOJOURNALISM
This category recognizes the informative photographic documentation of an event or subject in real-time. Photo essays accompanied by text are judged primarily on the strength of the photographs.

Winner: National Geographic: Chris Johns, editor-in-chief; David Griffin, director of photography; Kurt F. Mutchler and Susan A. Smith, deputy directors, photography, for Who Murdered the Virunga Gorillas?, by Mark Jenkins, photographs by Brent Stirton, July.

PHOTO PORTFOLIO
This category honors creative photography and photo illustration.

Winner: The New Yorker: David Remnick, editor; Elisabeth Biondi, visuals editor, for Service, portfolio by Platon, September 29.

Also the awesome upsets were: Backpacker beats The New Yorker and Harper’s in the Essay category, Field and Stream beats Vogue, The New Yorker, Bon Appetite and Pop Sci in the 1-2 mill General Excellence category and Reader’s Digest wins the over 2 million circ General Excellence award (I think the Photography Director should get a leg or two off the ellie for this win).

Looks like they’ve managed to avoid the embarrassing handing out of an award to a magazine that doesn’t exist anymore.

Full report (here).

Deal Flow, The Key To Finding New Talent

I really like the analogy in this piece over on DLK Collection (It’s a long piece so go have a look) that Joerg sent me:

“While gallery owners often complain about the “overwhelming” “deluge” of solicitations they receive and the challenges of responding to each and every one, the reality is having good “deal flow” (access to the best new artists that come along) is the key to a sustainable business, and smart dealers (especially those focused on emerging work) invest time in their networks and build systems for reviewing each portfolio with honest care and attention, ensuring that the artist feels genuinely respected and helped, as a positive experience leads to more deal flow down the road. Given that each gallery has a different vision of what will sell and what is important over a long time scale, the trick is sift through literally hundreds in search of the one or two that fit the program as envisioned.”

“Silicon Valley venture capitalists work in much the same manner, looking for the needle (the next Google) in a haystack (a massive pile of marginal business plans), and often finding ways to get pre-screened deals (from known sources, feeder funds, and high quality referrals), where the bottom two thirds have already been cut away, leaving a smaller and higher quality pile that can then be reviewed with more attention.”

I guess this is why you hear the complaint from photographers that they get seen and people say they like their work but nothing ever comes of it. Everyone is keeping the deal flow alive by not being an asshole.