whilst you make some interesting points you seem to negate the work of the wire photographers that feature heavily on the BBC website.

Internationally I think the current crop of wire photographers are in a class of their own. Boston Big Picture relies heavily on them and if you look at the work that has come out of recent conflicts the contribution of the wire photogs are exceptional. Day in day out they deliver the goods, win the awards and get none of the glory.

duckrabbit

Thanks for taking the time to reply, I think we’re in agreement that BBC Online is getting better in making greater use of photography, the larger images on breaking stories as you say. I especially like the carousels, something other news organisations should look at. Sky News have an interesting take on this with video playing as soon as the page loads.

On credits, I have noticed occasional credits for what I assume are freelancers, but I don’t see why you can’t credit agency photographers as well – The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The New York Times all do, surely if you can credit freelancers you can credit agency photographers as well. The byline will be embedded in the metadata as well as on the agency website, certainly in the case of Getty/AFP anyway.

I know the BBC isn’t alone in not attributing photos – CNN, ITV and Sky don’t either, as well as many newspapers, both in print and online. So this is something that we as photographers should be campaigning for across the industry.

Hopefully the BBC can continue its upwards trend in using photography and through your blog you can bring an insight as to how the picture desk works and how BBC News uses photography.

I saw your blog post and thought I’d just drop you a line to say hi and address a couple of issues you raise.

Credits:
It’s not true to say we don’t credit photographers, for example in recent weeks we’ve run stories by Amit Lennon, John Robinson, Glenna Gordon and Kate Holt to name just a few, all were credited. I realise we don’t usually credit the wire photographers and this is mainly for practical reasons, both organisational and technical.

Improvements:
As you mention we are making some improvements, the new galleries (your point on captions is noted) and larger images on the front page for breaking stories, pictures across the full width of an article on occasion and carousels of images such as that used on the picture index. There is certainly room to improve but I hope you’d agree it’s far better than it was twelve months ago.

Fees:
Finally, in terms of payment then we have a rate card that is available on request, and yes, we do credit.

Though for obvious reasons the majority of our visual newsgathering is via video, I can assure you we do value still pictures here at the BBC, and it’s something I want to emphasize through the blog.

Best wishes, Phil Coomes, BBC News website