Why the New WSJ Contract Is an Existential Threat to Freelance Photographers
Eroding photographers’ rights, one clause at a time (and what to do if you’ve received it).
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By now, almost every freelance photographer has received the new WSJ/Dow Jones (WSJ’s parent company) photo contract. When I first got it, a cursory glance told me this wasn’t the usual photo contract, with the biggest industry red flag staring at me from the page: “Work-for-hire.” Alarmed, I brought in my trusted sidekick, ChatGPT to understand the contract better.
AI has been the biggest game changer in reading and understanding contracts, whose convoluted language is meant to confuse and cower you into submission. Most of the time, I signed whatever I was given, because it felt like a Sisyphus task to read, understand, and push back in a coherent way. AI enabled me to drop in the contract and ask for a point-by-point summary in plain English, including a comparison to the current industry standard. To make sure AI doesn’t hallucinate, I go over both the contract and the summary while asking questions and probing further to understand each issue. And while that still takes a bit of time, AI helps to demystify the language in a way that wasn’t available before, not without a lawyer.
This is what Lana (yes, I named my ChatGPT) told me when I gave her the WSJ contract for review. Everything in bold was Lana’s choice, for emphasis.
This is a very aggressive, rights-heavy editorial contract, Work made for hire + joint copyright is the core move here. Even though it gestures at joint ownership, in practice WSJ gets perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable editorial control and reuse, including sub-licensing, archives, promos, and future platforms, without paying royalties to the photographer. This is not a one-time editorial license in the way you describe to clients; it’s an institutional content acquisition. It’s doing something more exploitative and very modern: paying sub-market rates for permanent institutional ownership, and normalizing that arrangement as standard freelance editorial labor.
While the decision to sign rests with each individual, and there’s no judgment for anyone who felt they had to do it to keep working with the publication, every freelancer should be angry about this. For full transparency, WSJ is not my primary client, and I wouldn’t lose much by not signing, but for others whose main workload comes from the publication, refusing could feel like a financial death sentence. The catch is that signing it is a financial death sentence as well, slower and more insidious, but just as certain.
The difference between freelance editorial work, long the industry standard, and work-for-hire contracts is vast. Until recently, work-for-hire was used mainly in commercial contexts. When a corporation commissions work, such as Apple or a private corporate client, they almost always use a work-for-hire agreement, sometimes exclusive (the photographer loses the right to sell or use the images) sometimes as co-ownership, often after an embargo period. The fees for this are exponentially higher than editorial contracts. A commercial work-for-hire gig starts around a couple of thousands on a very, very low end, and goes up to tens of thousands. For that fee, sure, I’ll sign away my copyright, uncomfortable as that may feel.
Editorial rates are nowhere near those numbers. A $500 day rate is on the low end of the editorial spectrum, with many major publications hovering around $700 once you include a day rate plus a separate digital fee, and some going as high as $1,000+ when they’re generous with digital fees, equipment, assistants, and expenses. Such work has traditionally been governed by a standard editorial agreement that includes an embargo period, typically anywhere from 10 to 90 days depending on the publication, after which the photographer can license the images elsewhere. The more you work, the bigger that licensing image pool becomes, and the more passive income it generates to carry you through slow months. Without that secondary income, most freelance photographers wouldn’t be able to survive in the industry.
There are major publications with more aggressive contracts than the standard pay-per-assignment deal, such as The New York Times, which keeps the photographer and the publication as joint copyright owners, a model that gives the Times a non-exclusive, perpetual right to republish the images within the Times ecosystem (print, digital, and archives), while restricting syndication and third-party resale without permission and requiring additional fees for reuse. They pay $650 per assignment, a generous upgrade from $450 just a couple of years back, and they cover expenses when needed. The New York Times also gives a lot of assignments, so for someone working with the publication on a regular basis, the math is worth it.
WSJ, on the other hand, is more scarce with assignments, and at $500 day rate, it was not competitive even before the new rights grab. In general, $500-a-pop assignments are only worth it if they involve: 1) a subject you want to shoot anyway, 2) something close to home that doesn’t take too much time, 3) reselling potential. If you take away #3, the house of cards breaks down. WSJ treats the photographer’s intellectual property as though it created it, with the right to exploit the work indefinitely and for any purpose whatsoever. Instead of a temporary employer, with sub-licensing rights, WSJ becomes a competing entity to the very freelancers it hires, being able to sell the images without any royalties to the photographer. The math here does not add up.
The distinction between work-for-hire (WSJ) and joint copyright (The New York Times) is confusing but vital, so I’ll summarize it one more time. With work-for-hire, the publication is treated as the author from day one, and the photographer is forced to transfer ownership, so any “rights” the contract gives the photographer exist only because they’re granted back. With the New York Times model, you and the publication share the copyright under joint ownership, which gives NYTimes permanent license to publish within the Times ecosystem. But because the photographer remains the rightful owner of the images, The New York Times pays the photographer 50% of the gross receipts from any third-party syndication sales, whereas WSJ pays 0%.
WSJ’s contract gets even uglier after the work-for-hire clause, with a Trojan Horse of the idea that as the copyright owner, WSJ would be able to go after illegal licensing of the work and sue for compensation. The problem is that the work-for-hire structure makes it much more difficult for the photographer to pursue monetary damages for infringements because the photographer’s ability to ask for money or sue depends entirely on whatever narrow “rights granted back” the contract gives them. If that language is weak (which it is), the photographer can lose standing in court, and if WSJ handles an infringement with takedown notices or a settlement, the photographer’s ability to pursue such illegal uses independently can be effectively destroyed.
As if taking away the photographer’s licensing and infringement-earning potential isn’t enough, there is also an indemnification clause that can make the photographer financially responsible for covering Dow Jones’ losses and legal costs if a claim arises from the photographs. That’s right, you read that correctly. At the same time as it takes over the copyright, Dow Jones can push its legal bills back onto the photographer for third-party claims tied to originality and permissions, without a stated cap or a clear carve-out for Dow Jones’s own edits and reuse decisions. In contrast, The New York Times indemnification clause asks the photographer to “cooperate” with legal defense rather than making them financially responsible for it. For $500, the risk is absurd, and it makes the Goodfellas “fuck you, pay me” mafia motto sound fair and balanced.
What I’m most worried about is not just this particular contract, but the ripple effects it could have on the industry if photographers end up signing en masse. If we don’t push back as a united front now, whether by refusing to sign or by spreading the word, this will normalize the practice, making it an existential issue for freelance photography. It is then inevitable that other publications will take note and switch their contracts as well, until the whole industry is permanently shifted from an editorial standard to a work-for-hire model. Without passive income, the lifeline of almost every working photographer and the closest thing to a retirement investment freelancers have, this would be catastrophic.
I’m not the first to speak about this issue, in fact, I’m late to the party. Both APhotoEditor and Your Visual Colleagues, an anonymous group of freelance photographers, have been informing people and campaigning against the WSJ contract for the last month. Unlike theater and film, photographers don’t have a union, so this is the closest we have to a fortified front. Another group on our side is the editors. It’s unfortunate that editors bear the brunt of communicating unpleasant news to photographers when, by and large, they are passionate professionals who have our best interest in mind. I have worked with a number of wonderful WSJ editors, and I am careful to separate the messenger from the message.
So, what do you do if you’ve received the contract and you’re not sure what your options are? Pushing back against a mega-corporation like Dow Jones is a David/Goliath scenario on steroids, and the only possible remedy is a unified front of professionals. When I put up a survey on my Instagram about whether or not freelance photographers had signed the contract, the numbers looked promising, with the overwhelming majority voting “no.” The list of people who didn’t sign included some of the top editorial photographers working today, which made me think that WSJ wouldn’t just lose in quantity, but would also stand to lose in quality. It makes sense that contracts like this prey on emerging photographers more than they do on seasoned professionals who have other options, but in the end, it puts everyone in danger.
Your Visual Colleagues, an anonymous group of independent photographers, created a letter addressed to WSJ leadership explaining why the new terms would put freelance photographers in dire straits. Thus far, they have acquired 594 signatures and will be continuing their efforts to push the WSJ to create a more equitable contract. If you would like to learn more and to sign onto these efforts, here is the link:
Response to the new WSJ contract
More reading.
APhoto Editor, New WSJ Contract
The Murky Ethics of Photography NDAs and Work for Hire Contracts - I’ve written about the proliferation of work-for-hire contracts in a previous newsletter.
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Dina — great article, and important work getting this in front of people. Work-for-hire editorial contracts are a rights grab disguised as standard freelance terms, and they gut the one thing that makes a photography career economically survivable: owning your images and being able to license them later. I’m a fine-art travel photographer; my business is mostly fine-art prints, travel workshops, and stock licensing (so the closest I come to “editorial” is stock), but the same pattern shows up everywhere: low fees paired with language that tries to transfer permanent ownership and control. I’ve also lost count of how many times I’ve been asked to shoot for free on the vague promise of “paid work later if it works out,” which is the same kind of slow erosion you’ve been calling out for a while.
Thank you thank you thank you for speaking out loud about this. It's photographers like you, who have influence in the industry who can change this and make it better for all of us.