Daily Sun launches portal for readers to buy staff photos

LACONIA — A new offering from The Laconia Daily Sun aims to meet the needs of readers by giving them access to the paper's published professional photos. 

Images taken by newsroom staff while out on assignment are now available on The Laconia Daily Sun website for purchase through a variety of methods including digital downloads and physical prints.

Editor Julie Hirshan Hart said the program was first launched at The Laconia Daily Sun’s sister paper, The Conway Daily Sun, and it found a lot of success.

“They often had requests from readers who said they wanted to purchase photos of their children's sports games or beautiful landscape shots they saw in the paper,” she said. “They were kind of our pilot group to see how it went. Then after they had launched it, we were very fortunate to be able to use that framework they had built to set it up ourselves. We, similarly, often get requests from readers who say, ‘I love that photo that I saw in the paper. How can I buy it?’ We're really pleased to be able to offer them a way to do so.”

Rob Struble, who provides IT services for The Daily Sun newspapers, said the program has been up for a little over a year, and while sales aren’t setting any records, it has been well received by the community. Mostly, he said, people are purchasing photos from events such as graduations and high school sporting events. They may not sell any photos for a month or two, before selling several at once.

When someone reads an article at laconiadailysun.com that has photos with it, a “Buy Now” button will be visible at the bottom right of the image. From there, when placing an order, customers can select from products such as digital download, metal, canvas, ecard and print in a variety of sizes with choices for glossy or lustre prints. Physical items are supplied by FotoMoto.

The Laconia Daily Sun did a soft launch of the program about two months ago and have received several orders in that time.

“We did specifically get one request from a reader since we launched, so we were able to share with them that the photos were available for purchase and how they could do that,” Hirshan Hart said. “In addition to that, we've had a handful of other sales from people just surfing our website without it being announced. So, we know the need is there and we also know people are already discovering it and taking advantage of it. It's been really interesting to see the types of photos that they're choosing. It’s everything from events to feature stories, and I think so far they have been pretty representative of the great work that our staff does.”