By Katharine Mieszkowski: Google has apparently peeved some commercial illustrators by inviting them to donate their work to the multibillion-dollar company. The nut of the controversy: the search giant has asked dozens of prominent illustrators to contribute designs to be featured on its new Web browser, while offering the artists lots of exposure, but no cash in return.
"You'd think that if anyone can afford to pay artists and designers, it would be a company that is making millions of dollars," said Joe Ciardiello, whose drawing frequently appears on the cover of the New York Times Book review, according to the New York Times.
Yet the Google contretemps is bubbling up at a time when illustrators are seeing the market for original illustrations decline, because of the recession and the struggles of print media. Plus, a lot of Web sites use cheap, stock illustrations, instead of commissioning originals.
"There's a lot of concern that newspapers and all of print is becoming a bit of an endangered species," Brian Stauffer, a Miami illustrator whose work has appeared in publications such as Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly, told the Times. "When a company like Google comes out very publicly and expects that the market would just give them free artwork, it sets a very dangerous precedent."
Exposure or cash?
The illustrators' dilemma probably sounds familiar to many news organizations. They're simultaneously hungry for the traffic Google sends them and resentful of seeing their work featured on Google News without payment. But commissioning original illustrations to Google's own specs without paying a dime goes a step further than mere linking.
For instance, it's hard to imagine a company as powerful as Google asking freelance journalists to cover a specific story in exchange for the exposure of being featured on their site. Still, all freelance writers today face a micro version of that conundrum as they try to figure out what to blog or tweet for free, what to try to sell to a news organization and what doing the former does to the price they can charge for the latter.
mandalp1
Richard Davis
Chris Rywalt
Blue Roses
whitenoise
Anupum Mehrotra
Salon.com
Comments
http://open.salon.com/blog/bbd/2009/06/12/getting_over_myself
But unfortunately, that's what companies do. Internships - where college kids desperate for experience and exposure agree to work for free - are another example of this.
Companies know that there are some students who won't work for free and Google knows that there are some artists who won't give their work away for free. But as long as there are some who will, the system works for them.
But - aha! The PR "black eye" is the wild card here. They probably didn't even think about the possibility of a public backlash. But if the negative publicity can gain some steam, you can bet they'll change their approach quickly and offer to pay the artists (and probably explain that it was all a big misunderstanding to begin with).
In my former corner of the newspaper world, making money from the paper's web site was an ongoing struggle. Maybe when all print editions go the way of the dinosaur, things will change, but for now, it's a difficult necessity to deliver news on two platforms in two different ways in an atmosphere of people giving up their paid subscriptions to read the content online.
While the future of electronic journalism seems exciting, a lot of what we're getting excited about is produced by “citizen journalists” with cell phones and laptops in the heat of the story. These aren't people who are trained journalists, or who will make a living off reporting. Maybe this is the future of journalism, but I've always thought the best of what outlets offered are the follow-ups to breaking news stories, indepth features and investigative pieces, work that requires both knowledge and contacts.
The link Kerry Lauerman provided in the previous post about AP and the investigative journalism organizations was interesting. This might provide a model, but AP is struggling, too. In these days of cutting costs, its services are one of the things that can be either cut back or eliminated. Gannett, the company from which I was laid off, is providing more of its own national stuff. It's even offering completed national and world pages to its papers, supplanting any need for AP.
Since there isn't a newspaper or wire service around that can deliver content as quickly as the Internet, the question to me is whether there is a future at all for trained journalists, or will we have to depend on people with cell phones and laptops to provide us the information we need to make decisions about our lives.
I guess I am both excited about the future and totally confused. And I'd like to be paid for the work I do.
seriously, bill o'reilly is a hack who just spouts garbage. but he sells advertising, and that's why he's on the air. and millions of people listen to him, and some of them have guns.
frankly, as a nonentity, i'm tickled when anyone shows any interest in my work. it's wonderful to see something you've made proliferating over the tubes. i can understand the illustrators refusing, but i don't understand why they're so offended. the market is changing and they're foolish if they think they can just will their old careers to persist the way they're used to.
anyway, google is run by commies. that's why i like them so much.