The citizen sending in "news" to the magazines has every right to
do so. I see no reason why your pro standing is a protected class.
Papers and magazines will get the pictures from any source they want.
Freelance pros establish themselves with any number of outlets. That is
your job to keep up to date and have those outlets that pay what you want.
What is happening locally is that new magazines come and go, but some
are good ideas that catch on locally. They need freelance images and, although
the pay per image is not great, the networking is the best. More commercial jobs
come from work with magazines than any other. So, it is nice to think that
freelance for news/magazines can be a 'living', you are right, it is being taken
over by 'citizen' freelancers. The trick today is to use that freelance to expand
a commercial business.
It is yet another transition in the business model that news/magazines are
taking advantage of the dslr user flood of new users. And, why shouldn't they?
Hello,
since many people frequenting this forum are professional
photographers, I wanted to share a link to an article just recently
posted on The Register, UK.
The article is written by a pro photographer taking photos for
newspapers, and he wants to fight against the recent trend of
newspapers looking for cheap "user contributed content" (think
mobile phone photos) under the pretext of making a service to the
readers.
