First, the market for such images is almost exclusively in Indonesia. The useful life of such images is about 24 hours. Editors who need such images will make their decisions about which image to use within 24 hours. To have a chance of being used a breaking news images must be uploaded within hours of being taken. Sure there are weekly news magazines, but their editors also make decisions very quickly after the event occurred. If the event happens on Monday and the magazine goes to press on Saturday the editors will still probably make their decision in the first 24 hours because that’s when they will be focused on the Monday story. They will have other stories to worry about later on in the week.

Most of the Indonesian newspapers will have staff photographers, or photographers they work with on a regular basis. A big story like the elections will be covered by these photographers. It is their pictures that will get used. There may be hundreds of other great pictures available, but the publication has already paid for the pictures their photographer shot, so why waste the editor’s time looking elsewhere for a picture.

And yes they do use Getty, Corbis, Associated Press, Reuters and other wire services. However, they don’t necessarily pay higher than microstock prices for these services. That’s because they have an annual subscription to the wire service for a daily allowance of a certain number of pictures. The wire services are going to have a photographer covering something like the elections; his pictures will be available as part of their subscription so they pay for it whether they use it or not. Why pay more, even if it is only $3.00 or $4.00, when they don’t have to.

It’s also necessary to take into consideration that in most parts of the world newspapers and magazines are declining in size and are reducing the number of pictures they use. This means that they tend to depend more heavily on the few staffers they retain and on the wire services they simply can’t afford to drop completely. Thus, there are even fewer chances they will accept something shot by a freelancer.

There are hard news pictures that will sell such as an airplane crash — if you’re the only photographer who got any pictures. Or maybe you get to shoot Brittany Spears waterskiing along the Bali coast and you are the only photographer who knows she is there. Fat chance.:)

There are editorial feature pictures that might get used for such things as travel or food stories, etc. Such stories are in the planning stages for a long time and are often contingent on inexpensive pictures being available. But, in such cases the photographer or writer usually goes directly to a specific publication and “sells” the editor on the idea of the story, rather than waiting for editors to think up the story idea and then go searching for pictures.

Another big market for editorial pictures is books. If the editorial pictures you’re shooting illustrate points made in textbooks books, there is a good chance the picture editors of such publications may go to microstock sites to find them. But then that depends on whether those are the kind of pictures the microstock site editors are accepting into their collections. Are they more focused on news events?

Finally, maybe the best opportunity for microstock editorial shooters is web blogs. Typically, these people wouldn’t have subscription arrangements with anyone and they wouldn’t want to pay traditional single image prices. However, the fact that until now there have been no sales for these photos, probably means that there are no Indonesian bloggers who want to add pictures to their posts about the elections, or that those bloggers writing about the elections are unaware of microstock sites as a resource.