Asking First
Blogging is what you actually love. Making money at it is nice. Reaching people is nice. Getting flown to events or having companies care about what you think—that’s an adrenaline hit. But the real reward, the thing that keeps you coming back, is putting something out into the world and watching what people do with it. The arguments. The passion, the hate, the debate that follows. That’s the addiction. That’s why you keep doing it.
Then the lawsuits started. German lawyers figured out that bloggers were publishing photos without permission and decided there was money in threatening them. Suddenly every image on my site was a liability. So I sat down and had to think: how do I keep this alive? How do I write about the things I care about without getting crushed by legal bills? The answer seemed obvious—just ask. Ask the photographers, ask the magazines, ask the agencies. Get permission. Get it in writing.
It sounds logical. It probably is logical. But nobody in that industry actually expects to be asked. The whole thing is built on the assumption that people will just take what they want and worry about it later, if at all. Still, I decided to do it right. I felt good about that decision. Genuinely good. Had a few beers about it.
Then the responses came in, or didn’t come in, or came so late it didn’t matter. A magazine owned the photos. There was a ninety-day embargo. Condé Nast has policies. Getty has departments. A photographer would write back saying sorry, all his work was licensed to a print magazine. And by the time any permissions actually landed, the story was old news. Everyone had already written it. The moment had passed.
The unknown photographers—the ones just breaking in—they got back to me fast. They were excited someone wanted to feature their work. Those became my reliable sources, the ones I’d feature again and again. But the big names, the work that actually drives readers? That’s controlled by agencies and magazines and lawyers, and they move at the speed of bureaucracy. Or they don’t move at all. Or they say no.
This is the cruel math of blogging right now: you can publish fast and break the law, which means maybe getting sued, which is catastrophic. Or you can publish slowly and legally, asking permission, building relationships with PR people and photographers, getting on their good side so they’ll actually send you files and approvals in something approaching real time. But real time
by their standard is still slower than real time by yours. You’ll never be first if you’re asking for permission first.
I know some of this is just me venting. Getting the frustration out. I’ve probably written this whole thing just to vent, to get the annoyance out of my system, and also to remind myself why I’m bothering with any of this at all. It would be so much easier to just do what everyone else does—grab the image, publish it, hope nobody notices. But easier and right aren’t the same thing, and somewhere along the way I decided the right thing mattered more than being first.
Maybe the lawyers and the cease-and-desist wave did something after all. Maybe they forced all of us to grow up a little. To be more professional, more careful, more willing to actually build relationships instead of just taking what we need. The wild-west internet where you grabbed whatever and threw it up and nobody cared—that’s over. Had to be over. And maybe it makes us better at what we do, even if it doesn’t feel like it when you’re waiting for the hundredth email response from someone who will probably never reply.