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Why you need releases A release is a written agreement between you and the person you are photographing, or the person who owns the property you are photographing. The purpose of the release is to protect you from any future lawsuits the person might file for claims such as defamation and invasion of privacy. A model release says the person being photographed has given consent to be photographed and to the use of the images you capture. It doesn't just apply to professional models or situations where people know they are posing for photos. You should seek to get a signed model release any time that your photos contain recognizable images of people, unless you are certain that you will never want to use them for anything other than editorial purposes. A property release says that the owner of a certain property, such as a pet or a building, has given you consent to take and use images of the property. You don't need one for public property, such as government buildings (although you may run into problems just from photographing them, for security reasons). But for images of private property - and particularly of objects that are closely identified with specific people - you are safer if you get a release. The releases you obtain should be saved forever and should be linked in some way with the photographs to which they relate. You can expect to be asked to produce them whenever you license an image, and you will need them if you ever have to defend yourself in court.

Avaaz.org is a new global web movement with a simple democratic mission: to close the gap between the world we have, and the world most people everywhere want. "Avaaz" means "Voice" in many Asian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European languages. Across the world, most people want stronger protections for the environment, greater respect for human rights, and concerted efforts to end poverty, corruption and war. Yet globalization faces a huge democratic deficit as international decisions are shaped by political elites and unaccountable corporations -- not the views and values of the world's people. Technology and the internet have allowed citizens to connect and mobilize like never before. The rise of a new model of internet-driven, people-powered politics is changing countries from Australia to the Philippines to the United States. Avaaz takes this model global, connecting people across borders to bring people powered politics to international decision-making.

In his second month as a professor at Arizona State University, Tim McGuire was standing in front of 13 students teaching "The Business of Journalism" when his inner voice interrupted. "You dummy," he recalls thinking, "you are teaching a history course." It was fall 2006, and he was talking about the production of a daily newspaper, but not about the parallel production of a 24-hour-a-day Web site. He was explaining the collapse of the print classified advertising market, but not the striking success of Google search advertisements. Skip to next paragraph Education Life Go to Special Section » The course, new to the curriculum, was in desperate need of a revision already. Mr. McGuire, a 23-year veteran of The Star Tribune in Minneapolis, was in need of a re-­education himself. "I knew what I knew until I realized there was an earthquake underfoot," he says. He immersed himself in Internet business models. He started a blog. The course was renamed "The Business and Future of Journalism." He quickly learned that today's journalism students don't enroll to hear, in Mr. McGuire's words, "old newspaper farts telling them that the business is doomed." "They know the model is broken," he says. "They think, We'll just have to fix it." And so he started this semester by outlining an intimidating theme for the course: "How do we pay for journalism?"

'The dedicated cit-j agency model isn't the way forward' Posted: 09/02/09 By: Kyle MacRae email this story | post a comment Profile picture of Kyle Macrae Scoopt, the 'citizen journalism' photo agency I co-founded in 2005 and sold to Getty Images in 2007, is no more. On a personal level, that's a little sad: like losing a child, albeit an errant one that left home long ago. But, as a business decision, I understand Getty's move completely: fundamentally, the Scoopt model doesn't work. That's not to say that people don't want to sell their newsworthy images; many of them do. Nor is to say that the mainstream media has little appetite for such pictures; it most certainly does (note, that's newsworthy pictures we're talking about, not 24,000 snapshots of snow). But it is to say - in my personal but rather battle-weary opinion - that the dedicated cit-j agency model isn't the way forward.

While it's a no-brainer to say (as I did endlessly) that whenever news breaks there's likely to be a punter with a cameraphone on the scene before a pro, the chances of that punter already being a member of your agency, or even having heard of it, are vanishingly small.

Interview with Bruce Davidson, The Kojo Nnamdi Show (WAMU/Chicago), November 2006 Q: You're on the streets of Chicago, wandering into Pentecostal churches, how did that initial roaming around, years ago, play out later in life? BD: I think that I was a born loner. My mother was a single parent, working in a torpedo factory in the Midwest, and I didn't like school. I felt very isolated. And so I could do both my reading and my writing at the same time, with a camera. Q: And that is what became the trajectory for the rest of your life. I want to go to 1961, because even as I look at the book "Time of Change", I think it was before you ever rode with the Freedom Riders that you got a job to shoot fashion models. And you got caught-up in that - it was quite glamorous. But at the time, your heart wasn't really in it, was it. BD: In 1959, I photographed a Brooklyn gang for a year. And when that was published, Alex Lieberman at Vogue asked me if I'd like to do fashion. He'd been told by Cartier-Bresson that I could do fashion because I could do gangs - it doesn't make a difference. So I began to do fashion to support other things I wanted to do. But my heart wasn't in it. The models were too tall and too sophisticated for me, and I'm a sloppy dresser.

There is no overarching ban on photography, nor is their likely to be. Yet, as a new Manifesto Club report by gallery director Pauline Hadaway outlines, there is growing regulation of citizen photography, with touchy subjects now ranging from policemen to transport facilities, from children's nativity plays to football matches. This is a model of how liberty is lost today: often not with a blanket draconian law, but through incoherent and creeping restriction at a local level, with rules drawn up by community safety wardens, private security guards and other self-appointed "jobsworths".

David Simon Blasts Citizen Journalism, Prescribes Non-Profit Newspaper Model We listened to articulate, qualified, high-minded participants in Sen. John Kerry's subcommittee hearing on the bleak future of journalism this week (as his hometown paper, The Boston Globe, struggles to stay afloat). One who impressed most was longtime Baltimore Sun cop reporter David Simon, who parlayed his journalism experience into a thriving career as a top TV drama producer. His venerated shows (including HBO's "The Wire") often investigate thorny journalism issues.

Citizenside: is there a future for citizen photojournalism? Posted by Emma Heald on February 18, 2009 at 10:20 AM Following Getty Images' decision to close its citizen journalism arm Scoopt, the venture's founder Kyle MacRae explained in an interview why "the dedicated cit-j agency model isn't the way forward." His reasoning was that even though many members of the public may well be on a breaking news scene with a camera, it is extremely unlikely that they will be a member of a citizen photojournalism organisation. But has Citizenside, a small, young company based in Paris, found a solution? The Editors Weblog spoke to co-founder Matthieu Stefani and editor-in-chief Aurélien Viers about Citizenside's work and the way they see the future of citizen photojournalism.

posted by Nelly Akhmetova

Following Getty Images' decision to close its citizen journalism arm Scoopt, the venture's founder Kyle MacRae explained in an interview why "the dedicated cit-j agency model isn't the way forward." His reasoning was that even though many members of the public may well be on a breaking news scene with a camera, it is extremely unlikely that they will be a member of a citizen photojournalism organisation.

"On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical development-not so much because of the expressive power of the new medium as because of its accessibility to producers and consumers. That permits it to break the long-standing choke hold on public information and discussion that the traditional media-usually known, when this argument is made, as "gatekeepers" or "the priesthood"-have supposedly been able to maintain up to now. "Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff-and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession," Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who operates one of the leading blogs, Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new book, "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths." The rhetoric about Internet journalism produced by Reynolds and many others is plausible only because it conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely available online and didn't use to be. One is pure opinion, especially political opinion, which the Internet has made infinitely easy to purvey. Another is information originally published in other media-everything from Chilean newspaper stories and entries in German encyclopedias to papers presented at Micronesian conferences on accounting methods-which one can find instantly on search and aggregation sites. Lately, grand journalistic claims have been made on behalf of material produced specifically for Web sites by people who don't have jobs with news organizations. According to a study published last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there are twelve million bloggers in the United States, and thirty-four per cent of them consider blogging to be a form of journalism. That would add

SEPIA (Safeguarding European Photographic Images for Access) is a EU-funded project focusing on preservation of photographic materials. On this website you will find information about : * SEPIA publications: SEPIA reports, articles and recommendations * research: 'scanning equipment and handling procedures', 'preservation aspects of digitisation', 'ethics of digitisation' and 'descriptive models for photographic materials' * news and events: containing announcements and press releases about the latest SEPIA news and a calendar of events. * Links & Literature contains reports, articles and references to relevant resources * 'To Have and To Hold' offers some guidance in finding information about the long-term preservation of all kind of photographic materials. It contains an introduction to the history of photography, historical photographic processes, digitisation and preservation of photographic materials and list of relevant resources selected by SEPIA experts * Six SEPIA partners have made a representative selection from their collections around the theme 'Constructing Europe'. Each presentation shows how an aspect of modern society evolved in a particular country. Although developments were different in the various countries, the exhibition taken as a whole provides a sense of an emerging modern Europe. * training: about SEPIA workshops, seminars and the national SEPIA training events * orginal proposals for SEPIA I and SEPIA II

Assistance Wanted Photographers and Assistants have their say. Wanted: Hard working, energetic, responsible person able to carry 90-pound bags and rewire small electronics. Must not be afraid of heights or susceptible to motion sickness. Be equally as enthusiastic about working with fashion models and celebrities as with livestock, inanimate objects, mops and brooms. Must be able to wake up early, work long hours and function on little sleep. Valid driver's license and passport required; multiple languages a plus.

Taking Stock By Angela Wolff Back in the 80s and 90s, "stock" was the name of the game. The economy was good, the market was hungry, and agencies hustled to get their photographers the biggest clients at the best rates. But then came agency consolidation. New contracts were issued, and many photographers felt their "agents" had become vendors, chipping away at prices, demanding higher sales percentages, and leaving their photographers to fend for themselves. Some photographers have become frustrated and have left the stock game altogether. Others have simply decided to take matters into their own hands. Many are collecting fees from images still represented by the big agencies, while cultivating profitable stock models of their own. They have found ways - by creating their own e-commerce sites, by capitalizing on niche specialties, by maintaining hands-on relationships with buyers, or by turning low-profit deals into moneymakers - to make the most of the current stock market. The photographers we talked to all said that, when licensing their own images, they garnered higher fees than agencies would have. Not just higher than the percentage split they'd usually see on their commission statements, but fees higher than what agencies typically charge their clients in the first place. The reason: As the big agencies gobbled up more and more small agencies and subsequently cut their image libraries, they not only offered lower revenues to their photographers, they also gave their clients fewer options and fewer services.

Four Media Ethics students take on the ethics case of Photojournalist Kevin Carter and his infamous and award winning photograph "Sudanese Girl". We take a look at Carter's life as well as taking his case through Garry Bryant's Photojournalism Ethical Model. Finally, we come up with a decision on whether or not Carter was ethical in taking that heart wrenching photograph.

"Protect Yourself as a Photographer - Legal Aspects to Consider This article series is about the legal aspects that a photographer must think about when (s)he intends to make a business out of photography. Including information on legal documents, such as the model release form and photo contracts."

"In the third of a series of articles on photojournalism Adrian Evans, Director of Panos Pictures, suggests that photojournalists should cast off the past and look to new models of funding. "Working in photojournalism it sometimes feels as though industry commentators are circling like vultures waiting to pick over the corpse of our industry. "They misguidedly link the fortunes of photojournalists to that of newspapers and magazines, referring to an almost mythical past, a golden age when newspapers were the champions and supporters of photojournalism. Whether this era ever really existed is debatable. What is undeniably true is that newspapers ceased being the paymasters of photojournalists a long time ago. Quality photojournalism is expensive - researching the story, gaining access, spending time with your subjects, post production and editing - there are no short cuts. Newspapers and magazines spend a tiny proportion of their income on content and they certainly don't want to spend it on photography."

Everywhere you look there are dark signs for newspapers: bankruptcies, less print editions, the threat of closings in San Francisco and Boston, layoffs and pay cuts. But the journalism of newspapers will live on in digital form online. How will this after-life look? We brought together five people for the latest episode of 5Across who are working for newspapers -- or who have worked for them in the past and are now making their own independent forays online -- to discuss what's working now and what will work in the future. This was not a disussion about gloom and doom, but about things that these folks could see working at the ground level in their own experience. The informal talk ranged from business models to building site loyalty to how people can network online through "goodness" and not just trying to game the system. Here's the lineup of guests for this month's video show (who largely were beer drinkers):

november 30, 2007 by Jean Yves Chainon in Editor's weblog - outlines some failing citj business models. Mentions Backfence, Steve Outing, Steve Boriss,

This article looks at the role, impact and response to the internet, new media and citizen journalism during the 2007 protests.\n\nIt starts by going over the history of burma and the junta and the events leading up to the 2007 protests. This protest was different than previous burmese protests due to the amount of information coming out. Cyberspace was flooded with grainy pictures and videos taken by burmese citizens,\n\nThe internet allowed people in Burma to send information and pictures out to show what was happening bringing a new type of political activism and global advocacy. The burmese protests were influenced greatly by this new media, but the protests still failed and many were killed.\n\nThe article talks about Yochai Benkler who argues the internet has opened possibilities even for those living under brutal regimes. Cheap cost and decentralisation is the main factors that are good about the internet in this situation.\n\nThe burmese media used to be free when under colonial rule. This free expression may have sparked the independence movement, but was then restricted when the army took over and restricted the media. Old media is easy to control by controling the sources (eg newspapers and TV stations). The internet is the new media model. BurmaNet, funded by the Soros foundation was one of the 1st news sites. Others followed, many based in thailand and with contacts to pro-democracy movements\n\nThe government stepped up its efforts to stop this content and prohibited the ownership of computers without approval. It also made its own propaganda websites. The 2007 protests show that even though the gov attempted to control the media the internet is uncontrollable and info will get out. Web 2.0 was also in full swing with citizen journalists uploading photos, video and blogging. The main news outlets were al using grainy amateur footage.\n\nDuring the protests the gov blocked the internet and cell phones sometimes. \n\nMuch of the blogs were outsite the co

Photographic retouching exposed April 29th, 2009 The issues surrounding photographic meaning, manipulation and Photoshop have been prominent recently (see my previous posts here and here, with some updates amongst the comments for each). Via Fred Ritchin's After Photography (see his 24 April post) comes news of a Swedish government project Girlpower dealing with sexism in advertising. One element is a magazine cover where, step-by-step, you can un-do the manipulation of the model to see how the glamorous cover was produced. You can go through each of the twelve changes that have been made, and at the end click on a red button to see the complete before and after images. We know it happens, but in this case, seeing is really believing.

Talks about start up citizen photojournalism sites that were eventually bought by AFP and Getty. Scoopt founder Kyle MacRae talks about the how the model of his site, Scoopt, fundamentally will not work.