The Getty Monster

Last week there were two tangentially related pieces of news, first that the last NCTJ accredited press photography course was ending in Sheffield and second that Getty were extending their deal with Flickr to be open to everyone.

Responding to the BJP Andrew Cropley, principal of Norton College said:

The future of the press photography and photojournalism block release and full time courses is currently being reviewed following government funding cuts to adult courses, a fall in the number of applications to this course and changes within the media industry.

There’s a few interesting things in this, first is the cut in Government funding. This often causes colleges to go into a depressionary cycle, as the number of courses gets cut, so there are fewer students and as there are fewer students more courses get cut. The second point is a bit more interesting, as although the first would have an effect, it’s been my experience that photography courses are over-subscribed, so I’d be interested to know why applications have fallen. Is it something happening across the board? to photography courses? or just this course?

Finally there’s ‘changes within the media industry’ that probably means all manner of things which could be the subject of a thousand other articles. But one of the biggest causes is the subscription deals that the big agencies have made with publishers. More than ever the media industry has an insatiable need for images but declining circulation among traditional publications has led to cuts in Editorial budgets. Instead of investing the profits in the good times companies had been happily creaming them off and are now cutting back Editorial savagely.

This leads us to another depressionary cycle where the circulation falls so publications cut back on editorial staff, paper quality, number of pages and as the quality of the publication falls, circulation falls further.

Agencies like Getty have led the way with subscription deals for publications that give them unlimited access to their libraries for a fixed amount. This reduces the price of photography to virtually nothing. If a picture editor has an image from a freelancer and another from an agency with a subscription deal of the same subject in front of them, the pressure from the accountants is to go with the ‘free’ Getty picture every time.

Getty’s brutal ‘all you can eat’ model is an attempt to price everyone else out of the market. Last year Alamy opened up their library to unlimited subscription deals for UK newspapers, many Alamy contributors didn’t opt-in. Some of those who have, have asked not to be credited when their work appears via Alamy in newspapers, presumably out of the shame of how lowly they value their work.

We’re still waiting to see who’ll blink first, but I suspect it won’t be Getty.

The other strategy Getty employ is to simply buy up the competition. They recently acquired Rex Features, after more than 50 years as an independent agency Rex wasn’t exactly at the top end of the market either. Contributors frequently complained of low reproduction rates, late payment and picture usages missing from their sales sheets. The future of around 80 people that Rex employs doesn’t look very rosy, once Getty have hoovered up the library no doubt they will find little need for the people there anymore.

Which brings us to the second piece of news and Getty’s most recent ‘acquisition’ – Flickr. Getty has had a deal with Flickr for the last two years where Getty editors approached Flickr users to add images to their Flickr Collection. Contributors who accepted signed an exclusive contact with Getty and received 20% or 30% cut of sales for royalty-free and rights-managed respectively. It’s not known how the remaining 80%/70% is split between Getty and Flickr.

The deal with contributors remains the same, exclusive rights and a 80/20 or 70/30 split of sales to Getty, but instead of Getty editors trawling Flickr for images to add to their collection image buyers will be able to request images from any user on Flickr. Users will have to opt-in to have their images available to licence and at the moment it’s all or nothing, users can’t pick which images are available if they opt-in. In the Flickr Getty FAQ it does say however that Getty will contact users every time someone requests an image and if they don’t reply or don’t want to they won’t license the image.

It’s not mentioned if images in the Flickr collection will be available to publications with subscription deals, but as Getty has to contact the image owner every time an image is requested I doubt it’ll make much of a dent in the newspaper market.

Now Getty doesn’t have editors crawling Flickr what exactly are they doing for their 70% cut? Before digital cameras came on the scene photographers would send agencies their slides or negatives, the agency would scan or print them, touch them up and make any colour corrections before sending them on to clients as digital files or prints. They would negotiate sales with clients and at the end of the month they would send the photographer a sales sheet showing what had sold to who and for how much. For this work agencies would take a 50/50 cut of the sales, more generous agencies gave photographers a 60/40 cut.

So now photographers are capturing their files digitally, making adjustments on their computer, captioning and keywording files before uploading them to Flickr. And all Getty are doing for their massive 70% cut is negotiating a price when someone asks and sending the invoice. That doesn’t sound like a fair deal for photographers who are doing more than 70% of the work.

But not only are you giving Getty 70% for the privilege of selling your work, you can’t sell it anywhere else. The Flickr FAQ says:

Getty Images has the exclusive right to license your images and images substantially similar to those in a commercial context once you’ve accepted their invitation (and signed the Getty Images Contributor Agreement). Any and all of your other non-similar photographs not in the Flickr collection can be sold freely by you, though not on Flickr itself, because that goes against our Community Guidelines. You know, like, don’t use Flickr for commercial purposes.

So once you’ve signed your deal with the devil, he not only gets your soul, but anything that looks ‘substantially similar’ and to add insult to injury you can’t sell your images on Flickr yourself, because you know, that would be unfair.

Flickr has over 40 million registered users and it’s 4 billionth image was uploaded last October dwarfing Getty’s 24.7 million and (Getty owned) iStockPhoto’s 6.9 million collections. Although Facebook still leads the pack with 2.5 billion images uploaded every month.

So now there’s potentially over 4 billion images ready to flood the market at whatever price Getty decides. Remember that they have little interest in keeping that price high, once they’ve covered the cost of their staff and infrastructure, most of which Flickr is shouldering, they’re making pure profit. And if cutting into those profits a bit means bankrupting a big competitor, they’ll have little hesitation in doing it.

This is a bad deal for just about everyone but Getty, unless Flickr is getting a substantial cut out of the 70%, but a lot of Flickr’s infrastructure costs are covered by Pro subscriptions, advertising and Yahoo! backing anyway.

Getty has just acquired, at no extra cost, over 40 million contributors with 4 billion images. All it has to do is name it’s price when a buyer comes along and take it’s nice fat 70% cut.

Following the English Defence League

I’ve been covering the rise of the far-right, anti-Islamic English Defence League for the last year or so now. Their protests across the county have grown considerably from the few hundred that I first photographed in Birmingham, to the thousands in Dudley this past weekend.

Hallmarks of the EDL are insobriety, violence and racism. Their violence is often unprovoked and directed indiscriminately at whoever is nearest; be they police, press or anti-fascist protesters. Journalists who have exposed the EDL’s true nature have received death threats and photographers often come under a hail of glass bottles and coins when covering their protests.

Today I’ve written a report of what happened in Dudley this weekend, which I believe has been their largest protest yet, for the Expose the BNP campaign website.

The EDL are the only political group in the UK holding regular protests every month attracting thousands of supporters from around the country. Unite Against Fascism, which usually call counter-protests to the EDL, originally outnumbered them 2:1 now the opposite is true.

The threat from the EDL is real and growing. As journalists we must ensure their violent, racist core is exposed. The EDL are not simply “Peacefully protesting against militant Islam” as their publicity rather quaintly says and we must show that.

Expose the BNP are holding a pre-election Media Briefing on Wednesday 7th April on the BNP and far-right.

Can we take a step back please?

Ian Thomlinson's stepson, Paul King, weeps with his family on the 1 year anniversary of his death. Image © Jonathan Warren 2010

Ian Thomlinson's stepson, Paul King, weeps with his family on the 1 year anniversary of his fathers death. Image © Jonathan Warren 2010

Earlier today I attended a memorial for Ian Thomlinson, the paper seller who died during the G20 protests last year. There were numerous protesters there and even some of the organisers of the G20 protests. His family were also there to lay flowers at the spot where he died face-down on the pavement after being hit by a policeman.

There has been a lot of coverage of the Thomlinson case, so naturally there were a lot of photographers and broadcasters there to cover the event. But what I didn’t expect was the disgusting way that some, of what I would like to call colleagues, behaved both before and during the event.

As one of the organisers of the memorial told the assembled press pack that the family would be arriving shortly and asked that we be respectful and take a step or two back. One photographer asked how many of the family would be there, he replied that it would be ‘a few’ the photographer said that ‘two or three is all we need’.

It is our job as journalists to document events, not orchestrate them.

Shortly after the Thomlinson family arrived and a priest from the local church began to address the crowd, a broadcast presenter standing next to me interrupted him to ask if he would turn the other way to face her cameraman. He ignored her and continued to address the crowd asking for a minutes silence.

As the silence grew longer photographers around me were inching closer to the family as they stood weeping at the spot where Ian died. At one point one of the Thomlinson family had to push away a video camera that was beginning to brush against her head as the cameraman tried to get closer to Ian’s widow, Julia Thomlinson.

Then as the family left the memorial in tears they were chased down the street by a mob of photographers and cameramen, probably as they hadn’t been able to get a clear shot of the family at the memorial because they were surrounded by photographers, lenses inches away from their faces.

I can understand why there is a pressure to get these images, it’s difficult to explain to an editor that you didn’t get the shot because some idiot with a wide angle lens wanted to get in close. As soon as one person gets in close, everyone else has to get in close to get the shot.

As photographers we should be self-policing at these sorts of events, otherwise either we won’t be invited again or someone else will start policing them. A number of other photographers and myself repeatedly asked for people to take a step back but our requests fell on deaf ears.

Point 5 of the Press Complaints Commission’s Code of Practice states that:

In cases involving personal grief or shock, enquiries and approaches must be made with sympathy and discretion and publication handled sensitively.

So all I’m asking is, next time, can we all take a step back please?

The Demotix Revolution

DemotixI got an interesting email the other day asking if Demotix is good for distributing work – the short answer: No.

If you haven’t heard of it yet, Demotix is a citizen reporting/freelance photography agency. Taking an industry standard 50% cut of image sales, they say they broker images to media buyers worldwide.

Which is great if you’re a citizen reporter (not journalists, as some call them, but more on that another time) who happens to photograph a breaking story that no-one else has got. Like Bill Carter, one of Henry Gates’ neighbours who grabbed his camera when he saw police cars outside his neighbours house. The resulting images have netted over $4,000 in sales, with half going to Carter.

This is the sort of thing Demotix thrives on. When the Iran election protests began last year images from Demotix users were featured on the frontpage of the New York Times twice in one week. But unfortunately for photographers there isn’t an uprising or other major breaking international news story every day.

I flirted with Demotix for a month or so last year, uploading a total of 12 stories, mostly of protests but also some other events, a meeting of the Metropolitan Police Authority, ministers leaving a cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street and the opening of Banksy’s Summer show in Bristol.

Not one of the images I uploaded has sold. One was featured in the Demotix Widget, which appears on a various newspaper websites and for which I was paid a nominal amount.

It’s quite probable that the images wouldn’t of sold even if I’d distributed them myself, at most of the events I covered there were also staff photographers from large international news agencies: Getty, AFP, AP, Reuters etc. The other events I covered obviously did not fit into the news agenda that day or week so remain unsold, which is often the reality for freelance photographers working on spec.

Slightly disheartened that none of my images had sold, I reverted back to how I had distributed my images previously, uploading a web gallery of images and emailing the link, as well as a small selection of the images directly to newspaper picture desks.

Just after I had given up on Demotix I covered a breaking news story, Nick Griffin and Andrew Brons had just been elected MEPs for the British National Party and were holding a press conference outside Parliament. I found out just an hour before, grabbed my kit and jumped on the tube. I got there just in time and within minutes of the press conference starting anti-fascist protesters appeared chanting anti-fascist slogans and began throwing eggs. I and a number of photographers who were at the front of the press pack captured the moment the yolk hit Griffin as he was rushed into a car by minders.

I quickly got out my laptop and captioned and emailed the images to the newspapers, all within minutes of it happening. As I filed my images I was sat with another freelancer who was uploading his images to Demotix, he complained that the Demotix FTP upload was often slow and sometimes didn’t work at all. He also mentioned another thing I was familiar with from submitting images to Demotix, it sometimes took several hours for stories to be published on the site, as each has to be approved before appearing on the site, often longer outside office hours.

My images appeared in that days Evening Standard, the Daily Express the day after, The Telegraph website and the Sunday Telegraph that weekend. My colleagues images appeared on Demotix a few hours later and have yet to sell.

Speaking to several other Demotix contributors in London they say they have yet to make a sale through Demotix either, even those with hundreds of images and stories on the site. Most have earned the £12.50 Widget usage fee, which is paid if your work is featured on the Demotix Widget. £12.50 might cover your travel costs if you went by train or took a short car journey, it is hardly enough to make a living though. One Demotix contributor I spoke to said he’d made around £150 over a few months from widget use, which is certainly something, but he has yet to make a single sale through them.

There is no doubt that Demotix contributors have taken some excellent images, this image by Alessandro Vanucci of a Cambodian rubbish dump made the Eyewitness page of the Guardian. Other times Demotix contributors are simply the only ones there to get an image. Their coverage from Iran for example or the exclusive photograph of Ian Thomlinson lying on the pavement shortly after being assaulted by police at the G20 protests in London last summer.

But is Demotix the unique factor in these images selling? Almost certainly not. Just like other online photo agencies, Demotix is a (sometimes) convenient middleman for amateurs and semi-professionals. Images from Iran or of Ian Tomlinson lying on the pavement would of sold if they had been on Flickr, Zooomr, PhotoShelter or any of the myriad of other sites that allow users to upload their images for free.

I asked Report Digital founder John Harris his thought’s on Demotix:

Demotix is trying to make money out of low value sales of unique coverage in unusual circumstances – precisely the sort of thing that is easy to find once on the internet. It is not clear to me where they “add any value”.

As soon as photographers realise they can spend an afternoon Googling the picture desk contact details of all the media buyers (PDF) Demotix supplies they can take back the other half of their 50% cut, upload images to Flickr or wherever they want, whilst still charging a professional rate.

So is Demotix good for distributing work? Well they are, they’re just unnecessary.

Climate Camp: An Open Letter

2009-08-28_K8K0058 (1)

What happened
Yesterday afternoon as my colleague Marc Vallée and I were leaving Climate Camp we found a group of people arguing around the SWP stall that was selling newspapers and leaflets outside the entrance to the camp.

As we went in to take photographs the group arguing with the SWP quickly turned their attention to us, shouting loudly that we had not asked their permission before photographing them. They were immediately aggressive and threatening, I managed to calm the ones around me and walk away, however, one young man was persistently threatening towards Marc.

They stood a few metres away from the camp, talking for several minutes as Marc explained that he was an independent freelance journalist and that as a matter of principle he would not delete any photographs. The young man insisted that he did not like his photograph being taken and that Marc delete any photographs he had of him. He repeatedly threatened to grab Marc’s camera and delete the pictures himself or smash the camera.

After a while we felt that the situation had calmed enough to walk away. Marc said that they should both shake hands and walk away and offered his hand. The man did not take it and as we turned to leave he tried to grab the camera off Marc’s shoulder.

I stepped in shouting ‘Oi’ and as I did the man took a step back and kicked me hard in the stomach. We backed away and then walked away from the camp, checking that they were not following us.

What happens next
We realise that these few people and one incident are not representative of the camp as we have covered the movement for some years now. However, we believe that the camp’s policy towards photographers and the media have created an environment that sets the stage for this behaviour to happen. The atmosphere created by your policies and attitude towards photographers worringly parallels the anti-terror laws and attitude that we find the police using against photographers.

It is unacceptable to use violence and the threat of violence to intimidate journalists. We do not allow the police to do it and we will not allow protesters to do it either.

We would be well within our rights to go to the police and press charges, however, we are not willing to jeopardise our close relationship with so many of those in the protest movement.

We ask the man who assaulted us to come forward and apologise and that the camps organisers unequivocally condemn his actions. We would also ask the Camp’s organisers to seriously consider their responsibility for the negative atmosphere they have created within their movement towards journalists.

The media are not your enemy, but nor should we be your implicit friends either. We are independent and will report all sides of the story truthfully without fear or favour and that should be what you want of us too.

Signed,

Jonathan Warren
Marc Vallée

The above is an open letter that has been sent to the Climate Camp media team.

Climate Camp: Code of Conduct

2009-08-26_K8K0260

A metal fence has been placed around the camp to 'defend' the site.

As Climate Camp set up on Blackheath in south London yesterday I got hold of a copy of the code of conduct that journalists will be asked to sign if they want to stay on the camp outside of media hours (10am-6pm) and it makes for fascinating reading.

Most of it reinforces the camp’s existing media policy such as asking for everyone’s permission when taking a photograph. The code says ‘When you want to take a picture or a video and it includes people, always, always ask first. If you can’t ask don’t take the picture.’

The camp’s organisers claim that all decisions are made with consensus from everyone. But reading through the minutes of the national meetings before the camp, the code of conduct is only ever mentioned in passing. There is never a discussion about what it should be and what it should contain.

So what has resulted is the media team’s moral view on what the press should be allowed to do being imposed on everyone at the camp and on journalists. We do not allow the police to impose their moral view of what should be photographed on us, so why should journalists subscribe to the media team’s views?

Are they supposing that if the police were to raid the camp we wouldn’t be able to photograph it unless we asked everyone defending the camp their permission first? I spent all day photographing people setting up the camp, I didn’t ask a single one for their permission and no-one asked me not to take their picture.

In an interesting twist, this year’s camp is on common land, unlike previous years where they have squatted someone else’s land for a week. So the argument is no longer that they have no right to impose rules on land that doesn’t belong to them, but that they have no right to impose rules on land that belongs to everybody.

Their right to be on the land is equal to mine and any other member of the public. Just because they’ve put a fence up does not give them the right to restrict access or impose restrictions on access.

The final bizarre section is entitled ‘Understand our community’ and states:

  • Anyone who is responsible for violence, intimidation, harassment or unwanted sexual contact will by their behaviour exclude themselves from the camp.
  • We reject any form of language and behaviour that perpetuates oppression, however unintentionally: for example a racist or sexist joke, or interrupting someone on the basis of unspoken privilege.
  • Stealing and other breaches of trust, including informing on camp activities, will also exclude the person responsible from the camp. All allegations will be treated seriously but with an awareness that they can be divisive, especially if unsubstantiated.

Perhaps they copied and pasted this section from something they were going to hand out to campers because I certainly don’t think it can apply to journalists.

No interrupting? I’m not sure broadcast and radio journalists will be able to be follow that one for more than a minute interviewing someone. And the idea that journalists would steal, use violence or sexually harass someone on the camp are so far fetched I’m not going to discuss them.

I find the last point particularly insulting, I’ll assume they mean ‘informing’ in the sense of passing the police information that was given in confidence, rather than informing people by reporting – as is our job. Not giving unpublished material over to the state is an issue that journalists go to prison for.

In any case the campers needn’t worry as we’ve already to agreed to a code of conduct – the NUJ Code of Conduct. And that is the only code I will be agreeing to as I cover Climate Camp this week.

Climate Camp: Give it up for the Guardian!

The Guardian has set up a Flickr group asking people who are attending the Climate Camp this week in South London to send in their pictures from inside the camp:

Please share your photographs with this groups [sic] as events unfold. We’ll feature some of our favourites on guardian.co.uk and maybe in the newspaper version of the Guardian as well. By posting your pictures in this group you agree to let this happen (though copyright remains with you at all times).

Which is a nice way of saying, please send us your pictures so we don’t have to pay photographers for theirs.

Now while getting people to send photos and video to news organisations is a old hat for broadcasters, for the Guardian to set up a Flickr group to harvest free content specifically for an event is something new.

Citizen reporting is far from the best way to gather news. Climate Camp has always instilled a strong sense of Us vs. Them when it comes to the media and for the Guardian to try and cosy up with the campers and use their content for free has serious implications for how the Guardian reports on the camp.

If they want protesters to send them pictures for free they aren’t going to want to be too critical about the camp or actions that people from the camp might be doing. To say nothing of the veracity of the pictures that might be sent in by those opposed to its aims as well as by supporters.

It is no longer news gathering when the subject of a story provides their own content – it is propaganda. Would you trust the Guardian if it took content supplied by the police in the same way?

Or maybe they should employ professional journalists and photographers to independently report what is actually happening.

In a very small way this is actually good for professional photographers as it further invalidates the restrictions Climate Camp organisers want to impose on journalists, which I wrote about yesterday.

If anyone can go on to the camp at any time and take photographs – and now thanks to the Guardian’s Flickr group send them straight to the newspaper – there’s no reason that professional photographers shouldn’t be allowed to either.

The timing of this event may be by no means coincidental. On the 1st of September (half-way through the camp) photographers will be protesting outside the Guardian because of a new contract they have issued that says that they will no longer pay photographers for reuse of photographs.

This means that the Guardian will be allowed to use photographs as many times as they like and syndicate them to other news organisations in perpetuity without having to pay the photographer any more than the original fee for the photographs. Photographers rely on reuse fees to earn a living.

Over 800 photographers have signed a petition against the new conditions and many of them, including myself, will no longer supply the Guardian with images after September the 1st until they renegotiate the terms with the NUJ.

So if you want professional, uncomprimised reporting and photography from Climate Camp this week you might want to look elsewhere than the Guardian.

Climate Camp: No Out of Hours Access

Later this week hundreds of activists will be swooping on an undisclosed location (most probably in East London) and setting up Climate Camp for another year.

And like previous years there are restrictions on reporting.

In the past the media rules included black-listing journalists who had given the camp ‘hostile coverage‘ and giving ‘sympathetic’ press and radio journalists extended access but only after they had told the camp organisers what they intended to publish.

Thankfully those rules were dropped after complaints from the NUJ and all journalists were escorted around the camp for an hour a day. They also didn’t go through with idea of carrying a flag around so that journalists and photographers were identifiable.

This year the restrictions are less stringent, but are still a futile effort to control the story. Print and radio journalists will once again be allowed to cosy up with campers, as long as they sign up to the camp’s code of conduct. I did ask for a copy of the code of conduct but the camps media team did not respond before publication.

Photographers and videographers on the other hand will only be allowed on the camp from 10-6 which is an improvement over the 1 hour that was allowed at the 2007 camp at Heathrow and the 2 hours at last years camp in Kent.

We will also be accompanied by minders who will make sure “that consent is obtained from people being filmed and photographed” – It’s not like we’re professionals and photograph and interview people every day for a living or anything.

In previous years photographers have been herded around the camp to a series of photo-ops with lots of fluffy activists dressed as polar bears and penguins, which is great PR for the camp but not what most people would consider good reporting or journalism.

The camps organisers insist that the restrictions are to prevent the camp turning into a ‘media goldfish bowl’ but by placing restrictions on access they create exactly that.

The camp will be most likely once again in a field or park that they have squatted without the landowners permission for the week and will be inviting the local community and members of the public to come along to workshops.

So if anyone can turn up and attend the camp, why can’t journalists? As John Vidal the Guardian’s Environmental Editor said after the Heathrow camp in 2007:

I refused to go on the absurd camp tour. On a personal level, every journalist and photographer I talked to felt insulted. Why is a journalist – good or bad – not classed as a citizen? Why could not journalists inform themselves by going to the lectures and debates? Why should they not enjoy the same rights as anyone else? Why was my partner allowed into the camp but not me? Why could I only talk to people I had known for years only in the company of a minder?

Climate camp’s media mismanagement, John Vidal – The Guardian

Just as we should not swallow the police line that everything is going to be softly-softly community policing we should not accept the camp’s line that everything there is compost toilets and renewable energy.

It is our job to report events as they happen, not as others would tell us they happened.

The BBC Viewfinder

Earlier this month the BBC News Picture Editor Phil Coomes joined the ever growing ranks of BBC bloggers with his own: Viewfinder

The blog sets out to discuss photography on the BBC News website and more widely on the subject of photojournalism and photography. Coomes himself is a photographer, studying at the BA Photography course at the University of Westminster under Tom Ang, who you may remember from the BBC TV series A digital picture of Britain

The BBC has, in my opinion, long shunned away from news photography which is understandable given it’s long history geared towards television and radio. However as one of the most trafficked news websites in the world and as more news is consumed online the BBC has lagged behind by miles with it’s use of press photography.bbcnewsgrab2Granted it has improved in recent years with it’s new larger image and headline when a big story is splashed on the front page (see above) and more recently it’s much improved galleries, which broke the ancient constraints of  the old 465 x 300 px slideshows.

There are still some problems with the new galleries, captions over photographs may be a pretty and efficient use of space if you are a web developer, but not much good if you want to look at a photograph and read the caption at the same time without ruining the aesthetics of both.

Another bugbear of mine is the lack of credits on images, usually it’s an AP, PA or Getty credit over the image, again something that irks the photography purist in me. But is it really that hard to properly credit a photographer? If they can credit every member of the production team on TV and occasionally the journalist who wrote the story online surely they can find the space for a credit for the photographer. Even the ‘Have Your Say’ comments get proper attribution.

A shining example of news photography online is the New York Times, whose stories have images over the full width of the article and often additional images for the story which can be viewed larger. Most importantly they are fully credited, even when they are from the wire agencies.

Closer to home the Guardian also plays photographs over the full width of the column and credits them properly. The Daily Mail uses images and graphics so heavily on it’s articles that if there were any more there would be nothing left but the headline. And of course there is the Boston Globe Big Picture blog, which plays images at a screen-busting 990px across.

Clearly little value is held for the still image at BBC News, apart from it’s frequent celebration of meaningless mediocrity with it’s ‘Your Pictures’ galleries which serve little other than free-content filler and a fulfilment of equally meaningless audience participation.

BBC News has an annual budget of £350 million, but from the look of it’s shockingly sparse local news sites you wouldn’t know it (a subject worthy of a blog post of it’s own). I know of one professional photojournalist who was offered a meagre £15 for a photo, he declined their offer.

Until the BBC starts paying properly for news photography it will remain full of bland audience contributed and wire agency photographs. I lay the gauntlet down to Phil Coomes and others on the BBC News Picture Desk to raise the quality of photography and to pay a decent rate for it. Here’s hoping anyway.

Collateral Damage

This isn’t over-zealous policing this is a co-ordinated and systematic abuse of media freedom.

Jeremy Dear, General Secretary - NUJ

Those the words of Jeremy Dear, addressing the TUC in Brighton this week. His speech was in support of a motion expressing concerns over civil liberties, specifically the use of counter-terrorism laws and SOCPA against protesters and campaigners.  

Also the targeting of journalists by Police, he mentions the cases of Shiv Malik and Sally Murrer, but also the work of Police Forward Intelligence Teams (FIT)

Originally set up to overtly surveil Football fans and political protesters they have grown from a small unit attached to Metropolitan Police’s Central Operations to a nation-wide police tactic to gather intelligence on potential criminal activity and to deter known ‘trouble makers’ from doing just that.

Sounds like a good idea – if you’ve done nothing wrong you have nothing to hide, right?

But what has ended up happening is harassment of individuals who may have committed offences in the past or associated with those who have by being constantly filmed, photographed and stopped & searched by police at protests or other events. Even when they have done nothing but turn up at a political protest.

An article in the Guardian earlier this year looks at how this tactic of overt surveillance is being adapted from protests and football matches and turned on youths in Essex to harass them essentially into staying at home.

But what the FIT have also been doing which is even more worrying is photographing and filming journalists at these events. Something which they deny happens and if it does any images they do take of journalists those images are deleted. We are simply collateral damage.

As one of the journalists who has been affected by this I feel a lot differently. The recent example of Climate Camp last month comes to mind.

I and six other journalists were in a McDonalds down the road from where the camp was being held (not very glamorous but they have free WiFi) filing our images. When around 8 officers appeared outside with video cameras and started filming us.

There were no protesters from the camp inside or anywhere nearby. They were literally standing outside filming us working, this was not collateral damage, this was specific targeting and harassment of journalists.

One of the journalists who was also there was Jason Parkinson and over the past few months he has been putting together a film that catalogues these incidents so that it can be put beyond doubt that the police are doing what they say does not happen. It’s a short ten minute film that will be part of a longer, more in depth film later this year. You can watch it here:

In the last 24hrs since it was posted it has attracted over 500 viewers, please watch it, send it to colleagues and vote for it on the current tv website. There’s much more to come on this story.