The World That's Coming

So I said, great, let’s look through the last five together. And not all of them were in the public domain. So, I said, “How do you think about the use of these images?”

“Photographers are welcome to file a complaint with Twitter, as long as they provide proof. Twitter contacts me and I’d be happy to remove it,” he said. “I’m sure the majority of photographers would be glad to have their work seen by the massives.”

I pressed him on this point. Shouldn’t the onus be on him and Cameron to get those rights from the photographers they assume would be grateful?

“It would not be practical,” he said. “The majority of the photographers are deceased. Or hard to find who took the images.”

Zimmerman’s work is a more extreme version of the new, upside-down dynamic of web publishing. Instead of the publisher’s megaphone guaranteeing its articles an audience, the publisher only has an audience insofar as the articles “go viral.” Tens of thousands of readers see most of the dozen items Zimmerman posts each day, but millions see his blockbusters.

For those hits, the content and the clickbait headline are as important as the timing. He describes “going viral” like surfing: boarding a wave at the earliest possible point. “You don’t want to wait too long because you’ll miss that initial cresting,” he says. “It’s a race against everyone else.”

From the beginning, we’ve been very clear that we are not journalists and we are not a journalistic operation. I see how it might be confusing, because our content can overlap with journalistic endeavors and/or have the same look and feel as journalism. Oftentimes, the news focuses on what’s new over what’s important. Upworthy is the opposite: We will always feature issues and content that we feel are the most important, even if they’ve been ongoing issues… But we are an editorial operation—you can think of our curators as editors, and we’re completely dedicated to fantastic storytelling.