Take ad-Vaughn-tage of these silly stock photos...

One of the biggest time-sucks media workers face is hunting down images to accompany articles. It's fair and well if you've written about something local and can hop outdoors to take a relevant photo, but what do you do when you've written about something that's taken place overseas, an online-only topic like 'blogging' or something controversial, which is fine to write about but hard to illustrate?

You use stock images, of course. I've not yet met a publishing house of sorts that doesn't have at least one account with the likes of Gallo, Getty or even their own specialised in-house photography archives, which they tap into all too often - hence the same old 'crime scene' tape and court gavel pics that pop up again and again - a picture says a thousand words, after all, so you simply can't publish an article without one. Readers need something to rest their eyes on, to help them make sense of the swathes of text we bombard them with.

This brings us to my point - because certain writers follow specific news beats, so there's only so much they can write about, and only so many stock images they can use before everything starts to feel like it's been used before. Enter Vince Vaughn's latest laugh-fest.

Official title: 'Teamwork makes the dream work' © iStock by Getty Images

In raising awareness for their latest moving picture, 20th Century Fox has teamed up with iStock by Getty Images and released still shots that work as stock images - for editorial use only, mind - all featuring your standard business scenes, with bland laughing faces, grey suits - and Vince Vaughn.

Slate.com simply states: "These fake stock photos made to promote Vince Vaughn's new movie are brilliant", with The Wall Street Journal blog adds that "Vince Vaughn could be in the next PowerPoint presentation you see."

Click here to download the first set of images, only available this week, and keep an eye out for a new batch, to be released later this month.