Space Shuttle Twitpic Woman Gets Paid, Credited & Snubbed By Media

Space Shuttle Twitpic Woman Gets Paid, Credited & Snubbed By Media

Since snapping photos and a short video of space shuttle Endeavour’s last takeoff from her Delta flight Monday, Stefanie Gordon has appeared on MSNBC, CBS in Palm Beach and ABC in Miami. Her Twitpic photos got significant media exposure — popping up everywhere from Anderson Cooper 360 to The Washington Post.


“I told every news organization that contacted me, ‘as long as you credit me and spell my name right, you can use it,’” Gordon tells Mashable.

But when she sat down to watch the ABC News coverage of the launch, Gordon saw her video appear without credit. CBS News also used the video footage without crediting Gordon.

No organization was legally obligated to credit her. Twitpic, the Twitter-posting service Gordon used to broadcast her photos and video, recently clarified its terms of service in order to quell the news media’s habits of hijacking newsworthy images without asking permission. The company said media outlets need to ask permission to use images or videos — but did not say they need to credit the person who took them. Yet NBC and CNN both chose to heed Gordon’s request for credit.

“It angers me,” says Gordon. “You take the time, it’s your photo, it’s sitting on your phone … it’s frustrating to see your picture without your name on it.”

Other news organizations treated her like a journalist who would expect to be compensated after capturing a newsworthy event. Gordon says The Washington Post and The St. Petersburg Times each paid $100 for the rights to print each photo. The Associated Press paid $500 plus royalties for each photo, she says.

The range of news organization responses to Gordon highlights an emerging problem: As smartphones and sharing services like Twitpic create an army of citizen journalists, the rules for how traditional media uses the information they collect are still being created. Platforms like YouTube and Flickr Commons operate under a creative commons license; what’s posted there is up for grabs by news media — but what rules, if any, should be applied to other valuable media bouncing around the social media universe?