Getty Sale Influenced By Cell Phone Cameras?

By now you've seen the news that Getty Images might be for sale and might be worth $1.5 billion, higher than its current market cap of $1.31 billion. So far the only source of this information is an anonymous leak to The New York Times. Keep in mind we saw a similar Getty-related leak last February that didn't pan out.

The two Times reporters credited for the story – Andrew Ross Sorkin and Michael J. de la Merced – did a reasonable job explaining what Getty Images is all about, but this sentence made me cringe:

"Recent events — from the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former Pakistani prime minister, to the latest foibles of the entertainer Britney Spears — have led to a surging popularity of low-quality but on-the-scene photos, many taken by cellphone cameras."

It's a popular opinion that amateurs with cell phone cameras are killing the professional photo agencies, but the evidence is thin. And these two examples don't even make sense. The Britney downfall has been covered mainly by professional paparazzi, who do not use cellphone cameras. And while there were some important amateur videos of the Bhutto assassination, professional journalists played a larger role in documenting what happened. Indeed, splashed across the front page of The New York Times the next day was an on-the-scene photo shot by John Moore of Getty Images.