The most recent cover of Time magazine has spurred a discussion among photographers, designers, and journalists. The cover image — a jar of change  — came from iStockphoto and cost Time all of $30. That’s in contrast to when the magazine commissions a photo for its cover, which can run thousands of dollars. That has ruffled some feathers among professional photographers (see the discussion thread on which the photographer announced his image was used on the Time cover).

I think the photographers who are complaining about the $30 price tag in this case are wrong. It would be different if Time specifically commissioned this photo and only paid the photographer $30, but that’s not what happened here. Time went to a stock photo site and bought an image, just as anyone has the right to do. The fact that Time is a huge company has no relevance in this case. As long as they follow iStockphoto’s licensing rules and pay the appropriate amount for their usage of the image, I see absolutely no issue with them paying only $30 for a picture that they used on their cover. I won’t have any issue with it either if they went to a free stock photo site like stock.xchng and got their cover image for free.

Time may pay thousands of dollars to hire someone specifically to shoot a photo for a cover, but can anyone in their right mind see the magazine shelling out that kind of money for a picture of a jar of change? It’s such a generic image that if Time didn’t use that particular photo, it could have easily found a substitute. Or, if Time wanted to skimp on even the $30, it could have easily set up the shot. Heck, for thousands of dollars, Time could have gone out, bought a whole new set of camera equipment, and still had enough change left to fill a few hundred jars. If someone there actually said, “Hey, let’s pay someone a few thousand bucks to shoot a jar of change,” that person should be fired immediately.

Does stock art ruin it for the pros?

That was the charge raised by one commenter on the discussion thread about the Time cover, and Charles Apple also has a discussion on that subject. Will publications just resort to using stock art and lay off their staff photographers/illustrators/designers or not give work to freelancers?

My take: If a staff photographer’s job security at a publication depended on whether or not they get to shoot generic images like a jar of change, then their position would likely have been extraneous anyway. If, as a freelancer, you depend on clients paying you thousands of dollars to shoot an object against a white background, then you are either not going to make a living from that, or if you have been making a living from it, then you had a pretty good racket going and now that ride is over.

The way I see it, there are two markets: One for great work, and one for work that’s good enough or sufficient. Professionals used to be able to get work in both markets because of the scarcity of knowledge and tools. Now, there is still a market for great work, but the market for work that’s merely good enough is either quickly vanishing or rapidly filling up with new competitors, depending on how you look at it. If someone is looking for a great, top-quality photo, they’ll still seek out a professional’s services. However, if they are looking for a photo that’s just good enough, they no longer have to pay a premium price for it.

This isn’t just limited to photography. Look at all the Web 2.0 applications that have been cropping up. Every one of them is aimed at making it easier for the average person to produce work that’s “good enough” with relatively little expertise or expense. Some examples:

• Want to build an online photo gallery? It used to be that you either had to know programming or pay someone who did. Now, it’s just upload to Flickr and click the “Share” button.  Same goes for if you want to stream video or produce live Web casts. Can a pro with design and programming chops build something better? Sure, but why pay more when the free option is good enough?
• Want a Web site? Blogging software like WordPress has removed virtually all the knowledge barriers involved in putting up a halfway decent site. Of course, if you want customizations or advanced features or a really good looking, user-friendly site, you’ll still need to know design and programming. But again, for every person who wants a professional site, there are many more for whom that classic WordPress theme is good enough for their purposes.
• Are online photo editing programs like Picnik as good as Photoshop? Of course not. But they meet the needs of most common consumers, and they are free instead of the hundreds or thousands of dollars that Adobe software can cost. Of course, professional designers need much more horsepower than that in their image-editing software, and so they gladly shell out the money for Photoshop. For the rest of the population, however, the simple, free online tools are good enough.
• I wanted to put together an interactive timeline for work the other day. But instead of spending a couple days working in Flash or paying a Flash programmer oodles of cash for a less-than-significant project, I just googled “make your own timeline” and found a handful of free, easy-to-use Web apps that basically only required data entry. It only took me a couple hours to build one (embedded below), and its functionalities were beyond anything my paltry Flash skills could concoct. Sure, there are limitations (the inability to change the colors, for instance), but for my purposes, it was good enough. If we needed a really fancy timeline, we would of course place it in professional hands.

From a consumer point of view, these developments are great. It allows the average person to produce work that’s at least presentable without significant investments of time and money. It’s no longer either “pay a professional a hefty price” or “don’t do it”. Now you have extra options between those extremes. For the professional, this presents a challenge. You can no longer just build your business around producing work that’s merely presentable or good enough. You have to take it to the next level, beyond what these new applications can do. If the core of your business was based on building simple five-page sites that can be replicated in WordPress with relative ease, then you’re in trouble. But if your business is based on building advanced, complex sites, then you still have a market.

Tying it back to journalism

As King Kauffman wrote in his piece about the Time cover, the same pricing dynamics that allowed Time to get a cover photo for $30 is in play in journalism. Technological advances have made it ridiculously easy to publish and disseminate information, and that has led to rapid depreciation in the market value of professional journalists’ work as user-generated content stream in. Some of these are as good as the professionals’ work, and much are not. But when you pour this much content, regardless of quality, into the marketplace, it inevitably drives down the value of all the content in the market. To make a living in such a marketplace, professional journalists will need to elevate their work to consistently great rather than just good enough with an occasional great piece.

The question, however, is whether there is enough demand for great journalism for those who consistently practice the craft at that level to make a decent living. There’s definitely enough to support some good journalists, but I think it is a very real possibility that our new marketplace will not be able to support the same number of great professional journalists as before. That may or may not be a cause for alarm, since so many parts of this new equation are still being sorted out: the impact of amateur journalists, changing practices, new funding models. Whether we end up with better journalism or not, this much is certain: Many professional journalists’ careers will be (and already have been) ground up in the gears of change, and it’s not all because they refuse to adapt (can it ever be that simple when you are in the midst of such rapid shift?).

One other parallel to draw between the Time’s $30 cover and journalism: Much of the discussion surrounding newspapers’ move toward charging for online content cite the argument that it’s the consumers who determine the value of a piece of work, not the content producer. In this case, why did the photographer make $30 from Time’s use of his photo instead of zero when there are certainly other jar photos out there, including many for free? I would argue that it is in part because he decided to sell the picture on iStockphoto rather than post it to a free stock site. If Time saw the same image on a free stock site, would it have determined that the picture was worth $30 anyway and sent the photographer a check? While consumers do, to a large extent, determine the value of the work, the price at which a producer offers the work, also has some impact on the consumers’ perception of its value, even if it’s the difference between free and chump change.