:: Oughta be in pictures ::

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

Nick Denton, Publicity Cat - How the Gawker Media guy reaps so much media attention. By Jack Shafer

Denton's skills at media manipulation include a knack for pulling off stunts. In early June Gawker got the press on both sides of the Atlantic (New York Times, Observer) writing about its prank on Hello!, the U.K. celebrity magazine. Hello! had purchased pictures of Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, and their infant Shiloh for $3.5 million, and Gawker obtained and published a shot of the cover before the magazine reached the newsstand. Also, People had purchased the U.S. rights to the photos for $4.1 million.

Yes, the thrust of the article is that Nick Denton is a media savant (enough so to warrant a piece by a journalist on why other journalists like to write pieces on him), but this statistic shook me out of whatever naive bubble I'd been living in with respect to the economics of the paparazzi.

In this case the pictures were sold by their subjects and the proceeds were thereafter donated to charity by They Whose Double Helixes Leave Eating Disorders in Their Wake, but the sale was an open auction and the result would seem to be a market price. Also note that includes US and UK rights only - the worldwide total probably exceeded $10 million. To place the value in perspective, the average lifetime earnings of a college graduate holding no more than a bachelor's degree in America total just under $2 million (PDF link).

The repugnant behavior of some celebrity photographers becomes somewhat less outlandish (though no more morally excusable) as the risk/reward system is exposed. A fee equal to a few lifetimes' income for a single photograph can buy a pretty competent legal defense, a first-class ticket out of a town where you can't show your face, and a year-long open bar's worth of absolution. Thankfully there are still some of us around unwilling to part with their ethical compass for money.

On an unrelated note, for $10 million I can have your mother killed.

Posted by morland @ 01:00 PM

:: Comments ::

Apparently, People completely blew the market for paparazzi shots wide open. It hasn't always been so ludicrous.

http://www.salon.com/ent/col/fix/2006/07/10/mon/index.html

Posted by: Chadwell Stevens on July 12, 2006 06:01 PM

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