I was recently reading someone's blog, and I noticed that they had been solicited (via comments on the blog) by various broadcasting companies (BBC, NBC, etc.) to use the information and photos provided in one of the posts in a news piece that would potentially be aired on TV. The author/photographer would receive full credit for the original work. I'm just wondering . . . what's the right thing to do here? Just say yes as long as they agree to credit you? Should you ask for remuneration of some kind? This isn't my blog I'm talking about, but I thought I'd ask for some opinions anyway. I do have a blog (not that I imagine anyone would ever want to a make news story featuring what I write about) but if it ever did happen to me, I'm not sure what the appropriate response would be. What do you think?
I guess it depends on the blogger and how successful they already are. If they're still trying to find or grow their audience, then being mentioned on the news will boost traffic and increase the size of the audience. In that case, I think it would probably be wise to let them use the content for free, so long as it's properly attributed. If the blog is already well established and has a large audience (a blog like BoingBoing or something I guess), then I don't think it would be unreasonable to expect remuneration of some kind.
