A fierce and fascinating debate has broken out over the cover photo on Time magazine’s April 27 print edition. Time paid a pittance for the picture — at least a pittance next to what big magazines normally pay for cover art — and that’s made a lot of professional photographers furious.

They should get over it. But they and their gifted-amateur and part-timer peers — especially the ones capturing breaking news events — should start agitating for a better marketplace than the ones available today. More on that below, but first some background:

The marketplace for photography in an Internet era has changed irrevocably. In 2006 I argued that the professional who will feel the pain most in the short run are the folks who shoot spot-news pictures. I said, in part:

They can’t possibly compete in the media-sphere of the future. We’re entering a world of ubiquitous media creation and access. When the tools of creation and access are so profoundly democratized, and when updated business models connect the best creators with potential customers, many if not most of the pros will fight a losing battle to save their careers.

This was bad news for them, I acknowledged, but not for the rest of us — because someone with a camera (probably part of a phone) almost always would be in a position to capture relevant still photos and/or, increasingly, videos of newsworthy events. We’d have more valuable pictures, not less, and production values would take second place to authenticity and timeliness.

I also said that staff feature photographers were in less trouble. The Time cover suggests I was premature in that assessement, though I do believe that great artists would always have a market for their work.

The rub, as anyone who spends any serious time on Flickr already knows, is that amateur photographers are doing incredible work. Few of them can match the consistent quality of what the pros do, but they don’t have to. Every one of us is capable of capturing one supremely memorable image. Whatever you’re looking for, you can find it on Flickr or other photo sites including the stock-photos service where Robert Lam listed the picture that ended up on Time’s cover, a photo for which he said he was paid $30, according to this conversation thread on the Model Mayhem photo community site, which includes some strenuous objections from pro photographers.

It does strike me as absurd that a huge magazine with huge circulation can get an image like Lam’s for so little money. But that was his choice, and it was Time’s choice to take advantage of low price he was asking.

Just as some people gladly take the New York Times’ absurdly low pay when their freelance articles make it into the paper’s news and op-ed pages, some photographers gladly sell their work for peanuts to Time. They have their own reasons, which can range from getting valuable exposure — so they can (try to) charge more for subsequent work — to not needing the money staffers and more famous people can demand.

This gets trickier, it seems to me, when it comes to breaking news, where news organizations derive enormous benefits from having the right image or video at the right time and too frequently get it for less than peanuts. Indeed, practically every news organization now invites its audience to submit pictures and videos, in return for which the submitters typically get zip.

Which is why we need a more robust marketplace than any I’ve seen so far, namely a real-time auction system.

The sites currently promoting citizen journalists’ work don’t offer anything of this sort, as far as I can tell. This isn’t to say I don’t like those sites, which include NowPublic and Demotix, because I like them a great deal. But someone needs to go further.

How would a real-time auction system work? The flow, I’d imagine, would go like this:

Photographer captures breaking news event on video or audio, and posts the work to the auction site. Potential buyers, especially media companies, get to see watermarked thumbnails and then start bidding. A time limit is enforced in each case. The winning bid goes to the journalist, minus a cut to the auction service.

The premium, then, would be on timeliness and authenticity. One or two images/videos would be likely to command relatively high prices, and everything else would be worth considerably less.

Eventually, someone will do this kind of business — which could also be useful for eyewitness text accounts of events. For the sake of the citizen journalists who are not getting what they deserve for their work, I hope it’s sooner than later.

Like many of us, Ed Felten at Freedom to Tinker was puzzled by the news-article registry system announced by AP last week. After taking a look at it, he concluded that, yes, it makes no sense whatever and isn’t worth the fretting that’s emanating from some quarters. Key quotes:

As far as I can tell, the underlying technology is based on hNews, a microformat for news, shown in the AP diagram, that was announced by AP and the Media Standards Trust two weeks before the recent AP announcement.

Unfortunately for AP, the hNews spec bears little resemblance to AP’s claims about it. hNews is a handy way of annotating news stories with information about the author, dateline, and so on. But it doesn’t “encapsulate” anything in a “wrapper”, nor does it do much of anything to facilitate metering, monitoring, or paywalls.

…

It seems that there is much less to the AP’s announcement than meets the eye. If there’s a story here, it’s in the mismatch between the modest and reasonable underlying technology, and AP’s grandiose claims for it.

The AP and its newspaper owners are starting to remind us the music industry and its attack-dog RIAA. That’s sad, in the extreme.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald takes a long look today at a phenomenon that he and a few other bloggers have repeatedly observed. Namely, the online politics site Politico has a distinctly right-wing world view.

This is a simple fact, just as Fox News’ right-wing slant is plain as day, even though these news organizations don’t come out and admit the reality.

And the Politico editors’ disinclination to acknowledge the way they see — and report — the news has a secondary effect. They have accomplices in the traditional press. I’ve been looking for some hint in big newspapers (forget broadcast news in this respect) that Politico’s reports frequently have a Republican viewpoint, but haven’t found one so far.

Now, I have no problem with news organizations having a world view, and I do read Politico, which for all its superficiality sometimes has truly deep reporting. The problem is that most traditional ones pretend they don’t. I’m glad sites like Politico exist, but disappointed that they don’t make overtly clear the prism through which they see things.

Transparency would help. In the absence of that, deploy your own skepticism. That’s what Greenwald does, so relentlessly, and so should we all.

Lots of good info in this site, which asks people to “Think Like a Journalist.”

Note: I’m an advisor to NewsTrust.

Don’t miss Howard’s talk from London — he’s working on a lot of the same issues that I’m thinking about, and doing it with his usual flair:

Others have been more eloquent, of course. But allow me to join those who mourn the death of this great journalist.

I grew up in an era when Walter Cronkite told us that’s the way it was. It usually was, and he and his CBS News team earned a nation’s trust.

Many people think of the Kennedy assassination when they remember Cronkite — his moment of visible pain after announcing the president’s death. It was, indeed, one of those moments that stays forever in one’s mind and heart.

I prefer to think of him from the day that brought the greatest joy to an American generation: the first moon landing in 1969. Like so many others, I was watching CBS. The landing was a closer call than most of us knew at the time. Clearly, in retrospect, Cronkite understood how close the lander came to running out of fuel. The relief and happiness on his face in the above video after the Eagle settled onto the moon’s surface was a great moment, brought to the world by a great journalist. (Note: I’ve chosen the clip above for another reason, as well: Cronkite was reporting a story, and the focus was where it belonged, on the astronauts and the team that put them on the moon. The reporter wasn’t the story, and he made sure we all knew that.)

Walter Cronkite was, as we all are, partly a product of his own times. There won’t be — there can’t be in a media ecosystem like the one we’re creating — another like him.

It’s now widely known that hackers got ahold of some extremely private communications held by Twitter’s co-founder, and then leaked them to several blogs including TechCrunch. For a legal analysis check out Sam Bayard’s post at the Harvard Berkman Center’s Citizen Media Law Project.

A number of folks have asked me what I think of the situation. Here’s part of what I said on a mail list yesterday:

As always, the circumstances matter; I’d never make a blanket condemnation of such acts. The New York Times’ reporting of secret — and illegal — spying by our government on Americans strikes me as exactly what we want, and need, from journalists.

This particular episode, however, makes me want to take a shower. I wouldn’t have published the material, but that’s just my personal stance. As the saying goes, what the public is interested in may not be in the public interest.

TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington is almost certainly within his rights to post at least some of this material — though no way would his lawyers let him post it all, if it contains everything he’s said it contains — even if what he’s doing is, IMO, supremely cynical. Especially puke-worthy is Arrington’s public agonizing about whether (and what) to post. It strikes me, whether he intends it or not, as linkbait designed to pull lots and lots and lots of traffic.

What boggles me almost more than anything about this, by the way, is the shabby security at Google and Twitter.

One of the most important outcomes of this event, if we learn the right lessons, will be to improve our security practices when it comes to personal and company information. The systems we now use for password recovery are absurdly open to social hacking, and that’s apparently what got the Twitter folks in trouble.

Come to think of it, I wonder how careful the TechCrunch team has been about its own passwords and other security…

The Obama administration has turned its “online town hall” events into a parody of what they were intended to be, which specifically were supposed to include a genuine effort to include questions from the citizens of this nation in an open process, not the bogus pre-selection system that is turning into an Obama trademark. Yesterday’s health care event, for example, included just three questions from online contributors (and only eight in all, notes the TechPresident blog) in an event that makes some of George W. Bush’s staged events seem almost spontaneous.

When called on this by White House journalists, Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs responded with arrogance. He demonstrated not just contempt for the Washington press corps (which does often earn contempt) but also to the administration’s promises of openness and bottom-up accountability. A shabby performance, and worrisome if you care about how this White House will behave when its current public favor diminishes, as it surely will.

So when you watch one of these events in the future, be aware that there’s barely a shred of the give-and-take we were promised. This White House would rather rely, at least for now, on the kind of staging that previous presidents used so often, and which candidate Obama and many of his aides and supporters found so correctly offensive.

Inadequate journalism often leads to worse journalism. A case in point is Wired.com’s follow-up on a dubious Wall Street Journal story about alleged “deep packet inspection” (DPI) — an invasive digital surveillance method — on Iran’s mobile-Internet users.

Here’s how the Wired Threat Level blog posting, “Deep-Packet Inspection in U.S. Scrutinized Following Iran Surveillance,” begins:

Following a report last week that Iran is spying on domestic internet users with western-supplied technology, advocacy groups are pressuring federal lawmakers to scrutinize the use of the same technology in the U.S.

The Open Internet Coalition sent a letter to all members of the House and Senate urging them to launch hearings aimed at examining and possibly regulating the so-called deep-packet inspection technology.

Two senators also announced plans to introduce a bill that would bar foreign companies that sell IT technology to Iran from obtaining U.S. government contracts, legislation that is clearly aimed at the two European companies that reportedly sold the equipment to Iran.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture between Germany’s Siemens and Finland’s Nokia, recently gave Iran deep-packet inspection equipment that would allow the government to spy on internet users.

According to the Journal, Iranian officials have used deep-packet surveillance to snoop on the content of e-mail, VoIP calls and other online communication as well as track users’ other online activity, such as uploading videos to YouTube. Iranian officials are said to be using it to monitor activists engaged in protests over the country’s recent disputed presidential election, though the Journal said it couldn’t confirm whether Iran was using the Nokia Siemens Networks equipment for this purpose or equipment from another maker.

Nokia Siemens has denied that it provided Iran with such technology.

But similar technology is being installed at ISPs in the U.S.

The piece goes on at some length to discuss the reasonable concern about the threat posed by deep-packet inspection by ISPs, acting on their own initiative or for government-mandated surveillance.

But wait. The Journal’s weasel-worded original story itself (buried far down in the piece) acknowledges that the DPI may not be happening at all, at least not in the way the story strongly suggests or by the company it implicates. Read David Isenberg’s detailed explanations (here, here) to understand why the Journal story is so problematic.

Consider the sequence in the Wired follow-up:

1. Cite the Journal story and describe its contents with no hint that credible outside observers, such as Isenberg (a friend of mine), have major questions about its accuracy.

2. Add a sentence saying that the company accused of providing the gear to the Iran dictators flatly denies the report. (Don’t bother to mention that the only named source in the original Journal piece loudly denounced it on his own blog.)

3. Then pivot: Talk about US companies that are installing DPI equipment at ISPs, as if this proves the original point.

If Wired wanted to write about American ISPs using DPI — a topic that deserves wide attention — it shouldn’t peg the story to a Journal report that is so open to question, at least not without noting that people who understand the technology have raised serious questions about it.

Iran’s dictators are a murderous bunch; I have no doubt about that. Nor is there doubt that western telecom companies are selling dictators surveillance tools; they’ve been doing it for years — and in my view they are morally culpable in the misuse of those technologies. In the matter at hand, we don’t know for sure what’s going on.

For what it’s worth, I consider Wired’s Threat Level to be a normally credible and well-reported blog. But journalists should try harder to be careful on matters like this. Sloppiness in these circumstances can undermine our trust in everything else they report.