two comments & a postscript

**Gerri Bauer g*@news-jrnl.com**

1. Chris, can you add watermarks to your online images? My dad did this on a
small commercial venture, to prevent unauthorized downloads of reproductions
of his paintings.
2. "Even the editors come to think of the
free/cheap photos as worthless and will accept and publish fuzzy, off-color,
pixilated, ordinary photos in order to check off their photo lists and meet
their budgets."  This is not only unethical and unprofessional, it's not
true, at least from my perspective of 25 years in the newspaper industry. At
the newspaper I work for, photos that aren't taken by one of the 12 staff
photographers are usually done by stringers under contracts (written by
corporate lawyers, not the editors doing the buying), or by AP-affiliated
photogs. Occasionally, we get approval to buy a stock image or free-lance
pic but the request has to go through higher-ups first and, honestly, it
doesn't happen very often.  
    As someone who also free-lances and is married to a professional
photographer, I can find plenty to fault in the way the entire publishing
industry operates. But I'm hardly surprised at what I see. The days of
Maxwell Perkins are long gone. Most newspapers, magazines and book
publishers are now part of large corporate structures and are operated as
such. You need only look at the news to get a handle on the state of
corporate culture in America these days. More money in an editor's budget
(which, by the way, is usually shared with other departments), means a
smaller mansion or fewer perks for a higher-up.
Gerri Bauer
Daytona Beach News-Journal
P.S. I have at times perceived a distinct bias against editors on this list.
As both a writer and an editor, I can view this from both sides. Sure, there
are terrible editors. There also are terrible writers and terrible
photographers. The flip side prevails as well. So what gives? Are people
shooting the messenger? Most editors have to work within rules they didn't
create and are powerless to change. 
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