The Wall Street Journal Doesn’t Understand New Media

Iridium Communications Satellite Credit: Moi

Last week, I got a late message from the Wall Street Journal that they wanted to use my flickr photo of an Iridium satellite for their coverage of the satellite collision in space. Very exciting!

It would have been awesome bragging rights to have my (pretty unremarkable) photo appear in the WSJ. Unfortunately, I called them back late to give them permission, and they went with an artist’s illustration of the satellite instead. This irritated me, because the WSJ obviously didn’t understand the whole point of my liscensing the photo creative commons. You don’t have to ask permission to use my photos, you just need to credit me (or ideonexus) and license the photo share-alike.

This experience provided me some anecdotal evidence for why old, inflexible media, like the WSJ, are losing ground; afterall, The Tech Herald understood this and used my photo for the story, as did Popular Mechanics. It even made a forum and some blogs… not this one though. I didn’t know I had taken the photo.

Wired Science used my photo of Azurite with malachite to solicit photos of rocks from its readers. Discover Magazine’s blog 80beats used my Homo floresiensis photo for a story on the hobbit, and my Carcharodon megalodon for a story on the powerful bit of ancient sharks. Wikipedia has used over 70 of my photos.

Additionally Tête-à-Tête-Tête, Animal Photos, Animal Pictures Archive, SFGrok, ARKive, aquamarine, World Reviewer, The Tech Herald, Newser, Hydroponics Garden, ofellabuta, and Dispersal of Darwin all get Creative Commons and have used my photos.

This blog couldn’t survive without all the free-use images researchers provide with their press releases and all the creative commons photos of just about anything you can think of provded by the users at flickr. I’m honored to be part of this collective media.

SideNote: Interesting flickr phenomenon. Since the collision, there’s been a whole lot of photos claiming to snapshot reentry of the satellite junk. It’s possible.