The big news in December for contributors was full launch of photoworkflow.com, we posted a review earlier in the month.
Other than that things were relatively quiet, most of the news coming from various changes at istockphoto. (most of which I'm not going to weigh in on - but the description "Istock F5 epic fail" that has been flying about does not seem all that unfair considering this is supposed to be a leader in the microstock industry.) It's not easy to make changes to a big website without issues cropping up, but sites like google, paypal, amazon etc seem able to do it without all that many "unforeseen" problems. This, I guess, is the price you pay for making the royalty structure complicated.