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The Demise of the Professional Photojournalist
Dan Gillmor has a piece up on his Center for Citizen Media blog about the coming decline in the venerable professions of photojournalism and videography. It's hard to fault Gillmor's argument that the ubiquity of Net-connected cameras and cell phones will mean that, for breaking news at least, a pro will rarely if ever be the ones who capture the shot or the footage that gets widely published and reprinted. The comments to Gillmor's post are worth reading. One reader pulls out the figure that a billion camera phones will be in use globally by 2008.
I work with dozens of journalists and videojournalists (TV). While yes, some people do send in video news for us to use, most of the time it sucks. Horribly. Probably the largest use of user-contributed content to-date (with success) is CNN's iReport. However, not even all of the iReport stuff is end-user information -- much of it comes from the other newspaper and television stations that work with CNN.
Intelligent people or not, the population does demand a certain amount of traditional news. Some things can easily be covered in the future by freelancers or bloggers (like concerts and local events), but a blogger has nothing riding on being wrong. Journalists, at least, have their credibility--and whole career--on the line with big stories. If they are grossly factually incorrect, their career (at least in the big, large-pay markets) will be completely destroyed.
What does a freelancer or blogger have to lose? Nothing. A blogger "journalist" can simply get a new domain and start all over again, possibly using their old content to backdate content to make themselves look established as their new identity.
Sure, a journalist can simply change markets to escape criticism, but they can't change their name. What they say and what they do follows them forever.
While traditional mediums may be on the slow decline (Newspaper and local television), that doesn't indicate that they will become useless. Do you really trust these up-and-coming "journalists" to, say, explain to your grandmother why her voting location changed? Which "journalist" would she believe? They could all be wrong, for all she knows.
Most people will come to realize that non-professionals can hold a much stronger, and covert, bias than traditional journalists could ever hope to hold.
Every time I see an amateur video on the news I think "that's interesting, but it's too bad they didn't get a professional cameraman there in time."
Camera phones... shudder.
Yep, the most important photographs of the 20th century tankman,Iwo Jima,Hindenburg, etc were all taken by professional photographers despite the near ubiquitous access to cameras, especially during the second half of the century when mass production made them so cheap they literally were available in the checkout lane alongside gum and candy. I don't think that more access to crap is going to make people stop wanting something high quality. Heck look at porn on the net, there's tons of it available for free yet I don't see Vivid et al going out of business.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This is like saying that the availability of the Internet is going to destroy all fine literature. Professional, high-quality work is always in demand. Consumers will just have more choice and photojournalists will have to differentiate themselves with higher quality.
Currently hooked on AMP