6 hours ago
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Roughly 650 freelance photographers who work for The Wall Street Journal have refused to sign a new contract they say could funnel their images into AI training. The fight centers on two changes: who owns the photos you shoot on assignment, and the paper's new right to license those photos to third parties without asking you first.
The organizing was detailed in a first-person piece by documentary photographer Daniella Zalcman, published by the Columbia Journalism Review. According to the report, in November, the Journal notified its freelance photojournalists of an updated version of its standard contractor agreement. Two clauses triggered concern: a shift in who owns images shot on assignment, and wording that let the Journal sublicense photos without any limits and without carving out firms building AI technology. A group called Your Visual Colleagues, run by four regular Journal freelancers, started a campaign asking the paper to reconsider, and in the six months since they started, 650 freelance photographers who work with the Journal have signed on.
The worry is not abstract. The new contract's ownership language opens the door for the Journal to provide tech companies with a vast catalog of photographs to use in AI training, a fear grounded in the fact that in May 2024 the Journal's owner, News Corp, inked a deal with OpenAI that could be worth as much as $250 million. Under that arrangement, OpenAI gained access to both live and archived material from News Corp's leading news and information outlets, among them the Journal, Barron's, MarketWatch, Investor's Business Daily, FN and the New York Post, along with publications in the U.K. and Australia. The earlier structure of the freelance bargain, per an A Photo Editor breakdown of the agreement, introduces a "Work Made for Hire" clause and allows WSJ to sublicense work to third parties for profit. The Journal reportedly raised its day rate to $600, but freelancers argue that does not cover what the paper gains.
Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association, has been pushing back too. In his view, photographers ought to be asking whether such safeguards are written into the contract and legally binding, or merely reflect how things are done now and could shift with time. Editors can promise verbally that your outtakes won't be fed to a model or that sensitive images will be protected, but a handshake is not a clause. "At the end of the day," Osterreicher said, "I think the debate is less about any single provision and more about a fundamental question: Who controls the future use of journalistic work, and who benefits from that use? That is a conversation that extends well beyond the Wall Street Journal and one that is likely to become increasingly important as technology continues to evolve."
Publishers are cutting AI licensing deals at scale, and the money flows to the company, not the creator. News Corp is not stopping at OpenAI; its leadership has been evaluating opportunities with other LLM developers, an approach CEO Robert Thomson has called a "woo and sue" strategy. If your images sit in an archive the company can sublicense without restriction, you become a line item in someone else's negotiation. That is why the ownership and work-for-hire language matters more than the day rate. Copyright is the one asset a freelancer holds that a staff photographer does not. Trade it away and you have accepted all the downsides of freelancing with none of the leverage that made it tolerable.
There is a fairer version of this available. The New York Times, which sued OpenAI rather than license to it, faces the same pressures and reached different terms with its contributors. Trade groups have been clear that they are not asking publishers to freeze AI out entirely. As ASMP put it, it is an unequivocal priority that photographers be consulted and compensated when their work is used in an AI training library or licensed to AI companies. The complaint is about process. The NPPA and ASMP are urging the Journal to work with them and similar groups to engage this community when developing these agreements so they can create something fair to creators from the get-go. Until that happens, 650 photographers are keeping their names, and their copyrights, off the contract.
English (US) ·