See the irony?

That developer worked for that newspaper (and presumably had a hand in all of their other, less-successful web sites). Given an opportunity to kill his success, they do.

The newspaper also didn’t own the images. All the work that newspaper is doing, with its large staff and operating budget, deep community connections, and even staff photographers and photojournalists, and yet it found relative success re-publishing someone else’s content in a simple, straight forward fashion.

And it probably violated copyright in order to get that done. And it justified that copyright violation as best as it could.. gently, you could say.

Are these industry people listening to each other? Are YOU listening to them?

Staff photographers are people trying to make a career out of photography. The industry has crafted a system where photographers, as we define them outside of that industry, cannot find success in that system. It seems the newspapers themselves cannot succeed in that system. The photographers whose images make that blog did not get paid for the use of their images. The newsrooms who put their photographers into the scenes to capture those images, including their equipment and travel budgets, did not get paid for the use of those images.

Now extrapolate these observations and the underlying concepts into a futurist-style evaluation (scenarios, sustainability and such) and you’ve got some fodder for pub discussions amongst like-minded peers. If said peers are controlling a portion of the web publishing world, from domaining through digital imagery, design, presentation, SEO, and monetization… well let’s just say if I owned a newspaper I’d want to listen in on those conversations myself.. probably out of fear if nothing else. That’s why I cited September’s ThinkTank meeting.