A few days ago, I got an email through Flickr from someone at the Daily Telegraph asking me to get in touch with them urgently. I gave them a call. It turned out that they wanted to use some of my Flickr pictures in an article for the travel section.
I told them that would be fine. I also told them that they didn’t even need to ask: all my pictures are licensed under a Creative Commons attribution license. They weren’t familiar with this so I sent them an email with some links and further explanation.
It strikes me that Flickr could be a very valuable resource for newspapers and magazines. The advanced search allows you to search specifically for Creative Commons licensed photos that can be used commercially.
The paper came out today and, sure enough, my pictures were in the travel section, duly credited.
Funnily enough, this was the second time in one week that I had been contacted by the mainstream media. Matt Bradley from the Christian Science Monitor called me in the run up to a story about Little Green Footballs. I had to confess that I haven’t visited that site in years, and I have no intention of going back to it. My explanation for abandoning the site is linked from the Wikipedia entry, which must be why I got the call in the first place.
I guess I didn’t have any good soundbites though. None of my pearls of wisdom made it into the finished article.