QuickLinks For 2006-12-14

• Change must come, so says Lewis Blackwell, Getty Images group creative director:
  By no means are all the images in microstock of lower quality ... Microstock will cannibalise some of the higher-priced sales of old, but will also bring in many new buyers to migrate through the market ... Currently we are seeing the image business move closer to the model for intellectual property (IP) distribution that is seen with words or music. In both those cases, you can go from custom writing or composition and performance right through to buying a discounted book or CD. You can go from spending thousands to spending pennies to acquire content. Photography and film are heading into the same paradigm, with pricing matched in relation to the degree of commoditisation of the product.
  Lewis Blackwell in the Brit.Journ. Photography.
  Tags: Wind of Change Lewis Blackwell

• TIME Magazine's pick for the best photos of the year 2006
  Tag: The year in pictures

• Flickr Trick: Finding Free-to-Use Images:
  Any news organization ... is free to use images ... bearing an appropriate Creative Commons license. You also can find these images on other photo-sharing services as well, but Flickr makes it easy. Keep this option in mind when you're searching for options to enhance your online or print coverage.
  I checked all three of those boxes ("Only search within Creative Commons-licensed photos", "Find content to use commercially", "Find content to modify, adapt, or build upon") to find the free-to-use photo above of U.S. Senator Barack Obama at a Nov. 2 rally for now-Senator-elect Jim Webb. It was taken by Daniel Farrell. Here's the original photo, which I found in my Flickr search. I downloaded the large version and cropped it.
  Hands-on training with Amy Gahran on Poynter.
  Tags: Flickr Creative Commons license

• Software for citizen journalists goes open source:
  Word comes that a publishing system, NewsCloud, was released today as an open-source media platform.
  JD Lasica/New Media Musings.
  According to NewsCloud, "NewsCloud is primarily the work of Jeff Reifman, a former Microsoft technologist: One of the coolest things about the NewsCloud platform is its expanding use of Smarty as a template engine to individuals and groups to fully customize the look and feel of their content without having to host their own server".
  For more infos, read the Wiki entry.
  Tags: NewsCloud citizen journalists