Somehow, nobody has figured how to give all of us an incentive to let each other use the stock photos we’re already taking.

A couple months back I failed to fully communicate this concept to a friend at The Oregonian. Here’s another attempt:

• Any news organization, large or small, can add photos to the pool.
• Anyone can buy photos from the pool a la carte, or pay for a long-term membership.
• Photographers get a cut for each download.
• Regular contributors get discounted memberships.
• Marketing types could buy and use the photos, too – though they couldn’t contribute, because only documentary-style work could be uploaded.

That’s it! My Oregonian friend noted that, like many papers, they already offer a little-used page where you can buy old Oregonian photos. This is different! Here’s why:

• It’s a two-way service. Newspapers’ photos-for-sale stores, like print newspapers’, are one-way services: we make, you buy. The problem is that even a large daily newspaper doesn’t produce enough photos to reliably have one to offer for any occasion. Opening such a site to every photographer in town would increase volume. Like at Craigslist or Amazon, audience follows volume, and volume lets you lower prices, and lower prices bring more audience.
• It’d be catalogued and tagged like any modern stock-photo site.

This second bit, of course, is the big expense of stock-photo services and the big flaw in my plan. My hunch: the tagging and sorting would have to be done by software or by a low-wage worker abroad.

But here’s what I’m sure of: Somebody somewhere could use the photos currently sitting uselessly on my hard drive.

At end of the day, that’s a waste – the kind of waste that the Internet, sooner or later, will solve.

That information is called news. It’s quite scarce and it’s very useful.

But news isn’t the only kind of scarce, useful information. Ever since the local wiki I manage started pulling in search traffic, I’ve noticed something pretty interesting: about 30 percent of our search traffic comes from people’s names.

We’re not talking about Britney Spears here. We’re talking about Patricia McCaig, a political aide to Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber, and Ted Buehler, a bicycle safety activist. They aren’t boring; they’re just not at all famous. They’re the most interesting hand you shook at the church picnic. They’re people who make it happen (whatever it is) without talking to the press or keeping a website of their own.

They’re people people are looking for.

Check out this chart of the 110 most popular Google searches leading to PortlandAfoot.org in the last 60 days:

Thirty-seven of those, or 34 percent (marked in red), were searches for people’s names. (For visibility’s sake, the vertical axis is a log scale.) If you don’t count Portland Afoot’s #1 search phrase, which is just the name of the site, people’s names accounted for 30 percent of Google-driven visits, too.

It turns out that people are looking for people quite a lot.

And – especially on the local level, I suspect – people are scarce.

(Extremely clever photo by an unknown photographer.)

Here’s a slightly improved version of the short presentation I gave. I’m an unusual advocate for wikis because I approach them primarily as a way to deliver information and only secondarily as a way to collaborate. I think this is a fairly good summary of the basic reason I chose a wiki as the main web component of Portland Afoot.

“Among the assumptions I wanted to test … was the idea that news consumers really are looking for context rather than merely the latest news. After all, during years of working in online newsrooms, I’d seen plenty of deep, contextual news packages ignored by our site users in favor of weather updates and crime reports.

“The financial crisis provided an early test of this assumption. At the time, news about the crisis was ubiquitous. All at once, every news organization was unearthing news about a different aspect of the meltdown—the collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the role of the Community Reinvestment Act, the status of the bailout plan wending its way through Congress. Amidst all this news, would people choose context?

“The answer was yes. The breakthrough news item of the year wasn’t an investigation that yielded some hot new scoop, it was a piece of on-the-record explanatory reporting by ‘This American Life’ and National Public Radio that went wildly viral. ‘The Giant Pool of Money’ went on to become the most downloaded episode in the history of ‘This American Life,’ garnering the award trifecta of a duPont, Peabody and Polk for its producers. Many listeners said they’d been tuning out all those crisis-related headlines until they heard the episode. For them, ‘The Giant Pool of Money’ was like a decoder ring for this news story. And once you heard it, you wanted more.”

Newspaper content is ephemeral by nature … It isn’t the same as downloading a song and keeping it and replaying it. It loses its value almost instantaneously.

…the speaker is not describing a problem with iTunes. She’s describing a problem with the way news is traditionally presented.

It’s a problem that can be solved.

Update 7/26: Jackie Hai makes a similar point, except phrased better and with extra insights. Read it.