Where it's at

Phil Coomes' blog on the BBC website has a really good Q&A with industry people about "Photojournalism Today", prompted in part by the trouble at Gamma.

It's hard to unknit the regular, perennial discussions about the way things have gone downhill since the "golden age" of photojournalism from the real concerns about the way traditional business models have been challenged by the digital media age. The bottom line is that in an age of unrestricted digital diffusion  the image has become more used and less valued. The potential audience for an image I shoot for a magazine today is bigger than ever, thanks to the internet (and the single figure "web fee" attached on to my invoice). The problem is that most of those people are seeing my images for free (and that's why the "web fee" is in single figures).

There's lots of nonsense theorizing about how business models might evolve in this climate, this review of the recent book “Free: The Future of a Radical Price" by Chris Anderson, effectively counters a lot of the more alarming ideas about the value of "content" that used to be called word and pictures. Even so, as a creative professional it's hard to feel comfortable with phrases like "information wants to be free" fighting to become part of the new business lexicon and the vague idea that by charging someone to use your photography you are foolishly clinging to ideas of information ownership that are so outdated as to be laughable.

Comments

[Matt]

This is a very relevant topic, worth discussion. As we become more and more accustomed (and already expect) 'free' as the norm online, how do we deal with the issue of compensation for content providers?

I am uncomfortable with the idea that everything becomes ad-supported and that content can somehow continue to be of high quality when the provider is expected to give it all for free (or in hopes of generating revenue through the magic of click-through ads). Something has to give – and soon.

Ultimately none of us are comfortable with the idea of working at our jobs without compensation, and yet once we go online, we expect everything to be provided for free or dirt cheap (like crowd-sourcing logo design or expecting to use someone's Flickr image just because you left a comment saying "awesome image, dude!").

I believe that, like it or not, 'free' is here to stay is some capacity or another (just look at Google Docs), but it can't work for everything – and not for much longer. The current model is unsustainable, and with services like Twitter still struggling to find a way to turn a profit as investors get more and more impatient, I believe that we're due for a new norm. What that will look like, I really don't know... Subscription? Opt-in direct marketing-enabled? Or will 'free' defy sustainability and dig in deeper, forcing us to revisit everything from copyright and basic issues of ownership to compensation and the very concept of a living wage?

Big questions – no easy answers.

[Dominick Tyler]

I totally agree about the expectation of free content and more. I'm a great user of all sorts of freeware and shareware from apps to fonts but I've also paid for similar, but better services and products.

Even though the internet/digital revolution has changed a lot of markets beyond recognition I think there is still a relationship between quality and cost. One of the most cutting criticisms of the "Free is inevitable and free is good" ethos is the financial black hole into which many "free" content providers are spinning, YouTube for one. To try to halt their descent YT have had to buy rights to better quality content than they can accumulate for free.

Advertising has been an uncomfortable but necessary partner of the media ever since the news-gathering became a national and then international operation. Newspapers have long since changed from selling the news to readers to selling the readers to advertisers. This works for newspapers and TV but now the ad revenue is spread so thin that it barely covers the web.

A new norm will emerge for sure and I'm equally unsure of it's nature. The sheer volume of information "out there" makes any meritocratic sorting more and more difficult. Perhaps we will start to feel more comfortable paying for "premium" content simply because it excludes the junk. Perhaps the tables could turn on the advertisers with "ad-free" content, at subscription rates, providing the only viable business model. I'd pay good money to never hear or see an advert again...but then of course I'd never get any advertising jobs.