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US Presswire Confirmed Sold to Gannett, Name Change

According to the Florida Department of State Division of Corporations, US Presswire's mailing address has changed to that of Gannett (NYSE: GCI) headquarters in McLean, VA on September 7, 2011:

Mailing Address
7950 JONES BRANCH DRIVE
MCLEAN VA 22107
Changed 09/07/2011

Also changed, US Presswire is now legally known as USPW Media Holdings, LLC, according to the same filing.

What remains to be known is what was paid for US Presswire. Likely Gannett will have to disclose this figure sooner rather than later, as it is a publicly traded company.

Over on the SportsShooter.com website (here), photographer Darren Carroll makes a remarkable point about all the photographers who were working for free for US Presswire:

"IF all of those photographers had insisted on getting paid a decent rate to cover those 5,300 games, Presswire would never have been in a financial position to offer such a bargain-basement deal for its pictures."

Carroll went on to do the math and illustrate the fact that these photographers, working for free, subsidized the build-up and sale of US Presswire:

"5,300 games (U.S. Presswire's number, from its own press release). For argument's sake, let's be conservative and call a "decent" rate $500 per game (commensurate with the standard S.I. day rate). If every shooter who "worked" for U.S. Presswire would have insisted on being paid that amount, that would be a $2,650,000 hole (not counting other overhead) that US Presswire would have had to climb out of just to be profitable. And the only place the company could have made that back was by charging more for its sales and licensing. Basically, then as Allen Murabayashi alluded to in an earlier post, all of the photographers who agreed to work for free just subsidized U.S. Presswire over TWO AND A HALF MILLION DOLLARS to help conduct its operations in 2010."

I can't think of a more solid example of how working for free is detrimental to all photographers and benefits corporate owners.



Here is the corporate filing data from the Florida Department of State Division of Corporations website:



You can view the listing here.

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Worth Reading:

US Presswire, Message Thread 1-51 on SportsShooter.com
US Presswire, Message Thread 52-103 on SportsShooter.com
US Presswire, Message Thread 104- on SportsShooter.com


Related:

Gannett Acquires US Presswire, 9/7/2011

One Gannett Photographers take on the US Presswire Acquisition, 9/12/2011

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