Via the wordpress.com deal (via RWW) i learned about PicApp (Shame on me that i didn’t learn earlier about them).
So what is PicApp? Basically they are trying to overcome an obstacle that until now (at least IMHO) hindered the proliferation of user generated journalism: Access to rights-cleared access to high-quality editorial photos of breaking news.
Basically the deal is the following. Everybody is getting access to 20+ million photos from Getty, Corbis and a number of other high quality news agencies. After signing up you are allowed to post these photos on your blog (see above). In exchange PicApp is overlaying the image with a viral element (that will also include ads). In my opinion, the overlay could be a bit less intrusive but it is still ok.
There is also wordpress plugin that makes the search and inclusion of photos in self-hosted wordpress blogs easy. It is a little bit buggy but a new version is already under way. All in all it took me about 2 minutes from learning about PicApp until i had the image from above included in the first draft of this post. Not too shabby.