A few days ago a family friend mentioned to my mom that it had been neat to see a photo of mine in The Oregonian, the west coast’s oldest newspaper and bastion both in local culture and my own life—my mother worked there from well before I was born until she retired a bit over a year ago.

My mom then fired off an email to me after finding a text copy of the article in question, showing that there was a photo credited to me. Of course, being a text copy, there was no way to see the photo itself, but the content of the article suggested it was probably this one:

"Old Perpetual"

I knew that the article had been published on Feb. 22, and I knew that I needed to find a print copy, as the online variant of the article didn’t have my photo, or any mention of any photo by me. David was smart enough to Google “lakeview lyza gardner” and the first relevant hit, after posts on my own site, was this (scroll down*).

Not only did I have a photo—unknowingly—in The Oregonian, it made the front page.

My first reaction was one of shock. Having been around various folks at the paper for much of my life, I know that they don’t source photos willy-nilly. There are photo editors and procedures and these are educated people. I’ve successfully published both written and visual items with them previously.

Is this a mark of the newspaper industry’s sinking ship? The Oregonian, specifically, recently capped a series of employee buyouts with a rather sweeping round of layoffs. Budgets are furiously tight, freelancers underpaid, editorial quality wavering. Or is it a display of digital ignorance in terms of how to appropriately search for legitimate images online for use in commercial publications?

The photo in question is licensed with Creative Commons’ Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic. That’s a mouthful, but the premise is fairly straightforward.

Detail of Creative Commons license page for this license. The highlighting is my own.

Not to mention that a photo editor or other professional sourcing an image for publication should know how to search correctly for appropriately-licensed images.

This little box at the bottom right of a Flickr image page links to information about licensing.

On Flickr—which is where I can only imagine that this photo was picked up—this can be done thus:

1. Get thee to the Advanced Search page.
2. Search for what you will, but near the bottom, make sure to note this section:
3. If you are looking for images for a non-commercial entity, say, this blog, which is just an instrument of personal expression, selecting the top box is enough (“Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content”
4. If you are, say, a major newspaper, you’ll want to be sure to click the box that searches for content to use commercially.

My mother, being ever a champion for my cause, followed up before I even got a chance (she knows who to call). I got a sincere apology from an editor and an offer of payment. Via an email, this editor claimed that this was only the second time a photo had slipped through the cracks during the six years he had been around.

I do believe that there is honest chagrin here. I’m sure that the professionals who are likely stretched impossibly thin cringe every time something like this gets past them. But at the same time, how much of this goes by silently? Would I ever have found out were it not for the fact that I live in town and know a lot of people who know a lot of people who read this particular newspaper? What do you think?

* I would have reproduced the image of the paper here, but the Kioske.net terms and conditions are weird/not originally in English and I couldn’t determine if it was OK.