I'm a staff photojournalist at The Spokesman-Review, a 100,000 daily where we're attempting to craft a policy on photographers' web sites. Essentially, management is reluctant to allow photographers to publish on their personal sites anything other than photos than have already been published in the newspaper--if you shot it and it didn't run, you can't use it. Their fear: If they allow photographers to have access to unpublished material, they might be forced to allow cops access to unpublished material, as well. I'm curious whether this issue has been tackled at other newspapers around the country, and how it's been resolved. It's my guess that this is a pretty gray area that's yet to be explored by most newspapers, but with the amount of work online by shooters who work for newspapers, I'd be curious to know how they work it out.

dan mccomb www.visual-contact.com

-- dan mccomb (danmc123@aol.com), July 14, 1998

Answers

>Dan, this is a good subject, and one that THE DIGITAL JOURNALIST may decide to weigh in on.

I think that the basic issue is who do the photographs belong to from the standpoint of intellectual property.

Even though you may have a tacit "work for hire" agreement with the paper, that essentially covers the work you provide to them to publish. Once you get into the area of the right of the creator, as opposed to a craftsman being directed by a supervisor to produce individual images, you are in a whole different world. Because, you, as a creator, can provide ideas for display of your pictures that has not occured to the print side of your paper, you should become an equal partner in the creation of these projects.

The issue of police being able to access additional photos should not be a concern, any more than it is the paper, because you or the paper are still in the role of "editing" the photographs. In other words, you and the paper decide what you want to display.

One of the problems that we see with traditional print outlets, whether it is your paper or TIME magazine, is that they fixate on "their property". It is the old fashioned concept that comes from "we have an exclusive!"

In the new world of the internet, where you want to project your brand as widely as possible, you embrace content creation, and then find as many partners as you possibly can to project the product across the web.

I think you should take this concept to your publisher, and hopefully he (or she) will encourage you to become as aggresive as you want on the web, as long as you carry the logo of your paper along with you.

-- dirck halstead (dirck.halstead@pressroom.com), July 14, 1998.

i am a staff photojournalist at Pzblico, a portuguese reference daily and we do have a photojournalism page, in the newspaper's site and are free to use every photograph in our personal sites. the paper's site is a way to show "more". one cannot publish 5, 10, 20 photographs of every story it covers. this way you have a lot more room to show your work. it works as a "add-on" to the newspaper. you don't have a space problem. as long as you have server space you can publish photos. the site has a decent number of visitors and we get lots of emails praising the work and encouraging us.

sorry for any spelling errors.

-- Miguel Madeira (migmad@publico.pt), June 24, 1999.

i am a staff photojournalist at Pzblico, a portuguese reference daily and we do have a photojournalism page, in the newspaper's site and are free to use every photograph in our personal sites. the paper's site is a way to show "more". one cannot publish 5, 10, 20 photographs of every story it covers. this way you have a lot more room to show your work. it works as an "add-on" to the newspaper. you don't have a space problem. as long as you have server space you can publish photos. the site has a decent number of visitors and we get lots of emails praising the work and encouraging us.

sorry for any spelling errors.

-- Miguel Madeira (migmad@publico.pt), June 24, 1999.