Wikipedia’s illustration Drive
The NY Times reports that Wikipedia, the popular collaborative online encyclopedia which traditionally doesn’t pay for contributions, is to change this ruling and pay illustrators for their work ($40), in a bid to compete with the Encyclopedia Britannica. Admittedly not a huge amount, but it does demonstrate how illustration is perceived to add value to an online publication as much as a print one (if not adding much value to the illustrators struggling bank balance).
I have noticed that many print publications that are making more and more of a presence online are losing the integration with editorial illustration that had in their print versions.
This should be a major concern for illustrators in the years ahead, as more and more publications move fully online. While a niche magazine such as The New Yorker makes ample use of its illustration content in its recent redesign, this is not the norm. The NY Times is one of the few print newspapers that actually re-uses illustrations for its online version, albeit often at a smaller scale, and often with the necessity for readers to ‘Enlarge this Image’ to see the full illustration. But this is still better than many online versions of newspapers and magazines such as Time, the UK Times or The Guardian which tend to lose their illustrations altogether from the print version. This of course may relate to various issues (apart of course from the issue of a reduction in the commissioning of illustration generally) – for example an illustrator only extending the rights to his image to print reproduction, but this would generally be built into most illustration contracts with newspapers today. More prominent is the issue of integrating the changeable size of an illustration that is reproduced for print into the more restrictive template space an online publication may have available technically.
Online magazines and news websites that have no print component tend to err on the side of no illustration whatsoever or to make a point of commissioning illustration and make more use of the full illustration integrated into the layout – for example Slate, A Brief Message, and A List Apart, but these website are few on the ground. Many creators of popular online publications or functioning websites such as banks or shops still make no use of illustration whatsoever, even when they are crucial to their print components. With rising online budgets for design and commissioning hopefully this will change, but it still raises the larger issue for illustrators and clients which is that of price. With budgetary constraints the Irish paper of record The Irish Times has cut down drastically on its use of editorial illustration in its print edition (It has yet to open its online edition to non-subscribers). With an opened up Irish Times online perhaps there would be more viability to increase its spend on commissioning illustration if this could be tied with its revenue generated from banner ad advertising. The revenue structure of banner advertising may also hold the key to generating an illustrators fee if it were based on the page views of an article for example, as opposed to a one off fee. But illustrators would need quite a change in mindset to make this a reality.
Illustrators could also make more concerted steps to build exclusive relationships with websites – for example as Kevin Cornell has with A List Apart or Robert Neubecker has with Slate. It would seem to make more sense for Wikipedia to commission one illustrator for its planned $20,000 splash on illustration if it intended to aim for the consistency of Encyclopedia Britannica. It might also give an illustrator a sense of ownership towards the project and a willingness to stretch that budget given the benefits the constructive recognition working for such a well known online publication could create.
While the talk among illustrators in recent years has been one of woe at the slash and burn effect the stock industry has had, it is perhaps high time they focused more on the potential online illustration can hold, than worrying about the fading lights of the print world.
