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.
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.
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