Category Archives: Legal Issues, Ethics, Model Releases

What do you get when you combine near-ubiquitous digital camera ownership (through mobile phones) and a tabloid media thirsty for “candid” photographs of celebrity and news events?

There are two answers, the first might be of interest to you, and your bank balance, the second serves as a warning of where this might end.

Scoopt is a service set up to sell amateur snaps to the press. And they have some success. You can sell a camera phone pic to a newspaper for hundreds, perhaps a thousand pounds. A lucky snapper got $2000 for capturing David Cameron grocery shopping on the day he became opposition leader.

The problem is some things really ought not appear in papers. Now, due to this phenomenon pictures are being made available and the media doesn’t seem to want to turn them down. For example a depressed woman’s suicide, in early January, made the front pages.

In the past, pictures like this would never have come into editors’ hands except in the remote chance that one of their photographers happened to be passing at the precise second of drama, the kind of coincidence that tends to happen only in comic strips involving Spiderman and his photographer alter ego, Peter Parker.

But, in 2006, we are all snappers. And we all have the wherewithal to take clean, printable pictures with our mobiles, then send them instantaneously to a news organisation. As it happens, the shots of the hotel suicide were taken by one Jon Bushell, a bystander in the small crowd that had gathered on the pavement.

He snapped away and dispatched his exclusive in significantly less time than it would have taken to write out the cheque in reward for his endeavours.

Source: Telegraph

There have to be limits. We know the media rarely have self control in these matters, the newspaper buying public do not give them any reason to have. It is up to citizen-snappers to make the “take it or don’t take it” decision, but with a few hundred on offer how many will? A situation only likely to descend further into the depths I imagine.

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