Daily Telegraph’s direct appeal to citizen journalists

Two weeks after launching its daily podcast, the Daily Telegraph here in the UK has made its second foray into new media space, with a front page banner ad that implores readers to "Snap & Send" their digital pictures of breaking news to the paper’s picture desk.

It offers no potential reward beyond "A great way to be a part of the paper." Not necessarily a hindrance in a major emergency – people tend to be happy to share their experiences witht he media – but the image of Tom Cruise suggests that the Telegraph may be happy to received pap-type images of celebs too.

Terms and conditions reveal that by sending it in you are:

By submitting your photographs you agree to grant Telegraph Group
Limited a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sub-licenseable right
and license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, create
derivative works from, distribute, make available to the public, and
exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to your
photograph worldwide and/or to incorporate your photograph in other
works and publications in any media now known or later developed for
the full term of any rights that may exist in your photograph. If you
do not want to grant to Telegraph Group Limited the rights set out
above, please do not submit your photograph to telegraph.co.uk.

Great if you are Telegraph fan and want to be part of the action. I wonder if they would be open to you sending a link to your images on Flickr, mentioning the terms of a creative commons copyright agreement you’d like them to abide by.

In fairness, for Telegraph readers this may sound like a lot of fun, but a cynic might say that the paper is being slightly arrogant in demanding perpetual rights to content created by citizens.

A fully informed Telegraph reader would surely ask to retain some of their rights to the image – imagine if it became an iconic, capture the spirit of the moment image, to be reproduced forever more on front pages, mugs and T shirts around the world.

Agencies like Scoopt are springing up at the moment, offering to take citizen-generated images and punt them to the papers for you. Being a financially astute bunch – you’d presume, given the demographic – you’d think that Telegraph readers might decline their paper’s kind offer and bring in a middle man to sort out the details.

So, if you have red hot pictures of breaking news, don’t want any payment for them and don’t want them to fall into the hands of the liberals at the BBC, then email them to mypic@telegraph.co.uk.

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