livebooks blog

A Photo Editor pointed us to some hopeful news about the future of the media industry. Maggwire.com is planning to charge readers a subscription fee to access a channel where they can get content from a large number of top magazines. On the other end of the spectrum, San Francisco-based McSweeney’s announced that they’re releasing a single-issue “21st-Century newspaper prototype” called San Francisco Panorama in December. It’s big and beautiful and nothing like a website — that’s the point.

The judge in the ongoing Google book settlement case ruled this week that photographers are not authors and therefore cannot be included as part of the settlement, according to TechCrunch. The motion to join the current settlement between Google and the Author’s Guild was brought earlier by ASMP, the Picture Archive Council of America, the Graphic Artists Guild, and several individual photographers.

Germany’s most popular women’s magazine, Brigette, confirmed with The Guardian that from 2010 on, it will be banning professional models from its pages and use only women with normal figures. Andreas Lebert, editor-in-chief of the magazine, said that he is tired of having to retouch pictures of underweight models to “fatten” them up. Conscientious has more on the story.

Last Wednesday, Toyota posted an apology on the Flickr forum admitting that they have been using pictures from Flickr without photographer permission. They have since removed the Flickr photos from their 4Runner website. PDN reported that Toyota USA’s ad agency, Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles, has reached out to at least one of the Flickr photographers involved.

You’ve probably noticed that the liveBooks RESOLVE blog has gotten a facelift. If you click through the rest of our site, you’ll see even bigger changes that are way beyond cosmetic.

Those of you who read RESOLVE regularly know that we rarely talk about liveBooks here. Our posts are designed to provide photo professional with the information and inspiration they need to run successful, fulfilling businesses. Today, liveBooks is doing just that — so we are excited to share our news with you here.

With the help of $5 million in funding, we are now making our websites available to all photo professionals and visually driven businesses for just $39 a month.

Our award-winning design team (that’s them above) has created a huge selection of pre-designed sites endowed with the same powerful search engine optimization and business management tools that have convinced industry leaders like Harry Benson and National Geographic to choose us as their website solution. With our new flexible pricing and subscription offering, these solutions are available immediately without a big up-front investment.

Of course, we’re still offering the custom-designed websites that we’re known for, and we’re continuing to serve our customers’ expanding business needs by working in innovative ways with our long list of partners.

Here at RESOLVE, you’ll continue to find helpful business advice, important industry news, inspiring new work, and a renewed focus on the innovators who are forging the path through this new media wilderness. As always, we welcome your input about how RESOLVE can serve you better and look forward to hearing from you soon.

~Miki Johnson
Editor, RESOLVE Blog

“Photographers get busy and don’t always come to the blog for news.”

Kodak’s new brand campaign named “It’s Time to Smile,” focuses on strengthening relationships by sharing important life moments, in pictures of course. Behind the happy message, though, is a not-so-cheery outlook. After thousands of layoffs and salary cuts earlier this year, the company reported yesterday its fourth quarterly loss in a row, PDN reported.

Jorge Colberg at Conscientious alerted us to an interesting interview with William Patry, senior copyright counsel at Google and author of a number of books on copyright law, including his recent Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. The interview covers topics from the AP-Fairey lawsuit to the moral imperative of copyright.

Popular news site The Daily Beast, in partnership with Global Philanthropy Group, has launched a philanthropy and photography site, The Giving Beast. Be sure to check out the galleries, featuring works of Sarah Elliot, Elizabeth Gilbert, Suzy Allman and other note-worthy photographers.

Despite some questions about its longevity, the New York Photo Festival will launch its third year in 2010, as Andrew Hetherington reported this morning on What’s the Jackanory? Lou Reed will be one of the lead curators this year, but Andrew tips his hat to Erik Kessels, whose 2008 NYPH conversation with Martin Parr was a highlight. We’re stoked about photo thought leaders Vince Aletti and Fred Ritchin (check out this excerpt from Ritchin’s recent book, too).