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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.
One might make an argument for this, but I am not quite so sure this is the "demise of the professional photojournalist" for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the ability to effectively communicate. Sure a picture can tell a thousand words, but that photograph needs to be placed in context. I take lots of photos that describe what I see, do and where I go, but I would never think of myself as a professional journalist. These images for me are a means to communicate and keep in touch with family and friends (a blog, right?), not to disseminate the news to the rest of the world. The fact that sometimes images from my site do resonate with news agencies/institutions or individuals around the world is cool, but it is a rarity that I get requests for re-publication (one every three months or so) and it is not how I make my living.
Additionally, there is also the issue of ethics that most professional publications usually get right, but there are the admitted occasional screw-ups. Usually however, there are issues of image/video provenance to deal with that may not always reflect reality ("I found it on the Internets, so it must be true!") that editorial boards put through a vetting process to filter out much of the fakery/deceipt.
The Internet has enabled the ability to democratically (small "d") reach huge masses of people with relatively few resources and I expect that we will see more citizen reporting as the years go on. It may in some cases also challenge the mainstream media for particular stories, but the reality is that most folks have other jobs/things that keep them busy and they do not have the resources or time to become professional journalists. When they do obtain the appropriate resources/time/credibility, they have just crossed over into the world of the professional journalist.
Technology will cause things to change and serve as a destabilizing influence for many established institutions, but I think we will always have and pay people who relate the news to us, bring us the wider world and tell stories. This will become especially more important as increasing percentages of societies become more specialized and fragment their time into narrowly defined regions of interest/study.
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A good headline like this should always be followed with a call for new legislation. We need to protect the industry. Perhaps we could ban trafficking in illicit news-related photographs, or the use of technologies that allow unrestricted sharing of such photographs on the internet.
On the other hand, the few photojournalists I know can usually take vastly better pictures of a newsworthy event with a disposable camera than I can with a phone/camera of any kind. Maybe talent will save the industry instead.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Additionally, professionals are much, much better at documentary photojournalism as well as photojournalism for pre-organized events, such as sporting events and political events.
I suspect that amateur photography will continue to push the professionals to do yet better. This can only be a good thing.
Mmm...
1 billion poorly lit, poorly framed, grainy images from cameras where people believed mega pixels === quality.
How did we ever live with slightly less timely clear images that were composed well?!
Besides, it's challenging enough to get alleged photo professionals whose careers depend on it not to add smoke to Lebanese buildings. How much is your reputation as a news agency going to be worth after your fiftieth photoshopping scandal because no on has a career to put in jeopardy but their odds of selling the single shot go up massively if it's more impressive?
Sure, some of the less valid photographers will face competition and things may get a little tighter for the great ones - but there'll always be a need for reliable quality backed by a scandal proof reputation.
Good news photogs are still going to get the shots they've always been there for. They also get access to places and events that other people don't get access to. Being part of the press corps does give you that chance to capture Gerald Ford tripping down the stairs, or Bill Clinton ginning up some Oscar-worthy tears, etc. But to the extent that a lot people are more interested in stuff that happens to normal people, even cheesy low-res MPGs are more relevent because they exist.
The other thing, here, is the presence of more enthusiasts' cameras in and around events/scenes that would normally never rate the presence of a professional. Not the county fair, etc., but oddball sports/leagues, minor-league political events, that sort of thing. I've found that some of my own special-interest events (outdoorsy stuff among the bird dog crowd) has been bone dry of any media coverage that doesn't come from within. Um, except when the vice president accidentally peppers a lawyer while quail hunting - then all the sudden everyone wants images from that world... for exactly a week, anyway.
But when I shoot stuff at an event, there can be twenty other people there with their cell-phone-cams, and it's the nerd with the heavy duty DSLR that produces the images people actually want. Most folks simply won't carry around enough glass to produce the sort of images that a pro or an insane amateur can produce, since it's just too inconvenient. Doesn't matter how many pixels a cell phone's sensor can pack in - the laws of physics are still in the way of those tiny lenses producing really good workable images, especially of active subjects in mediocre light.
I've also found that carrying a macho camera and strobes gets you in places. It's sort of like all of those times that I used a mic cable and got around college bar cover charges saying, "I'm with the band."
But the sheer number of images produced by all of those portables (say, the stuff from the Madrid train bombings) will certainly result in lots of web/broadcast coverage that an assigned pro would never produce. But what a professional (with his/her practiced eye, journalistic sensibilities, better gear, and credentialed access) can produce will never be replaced by the ubiquitous phone-cam. These things are complimentary, not mutually exclusive. But look at how the Michael Richards video clip circulated... that stuff will certainly eclipse other material's airtime when it's compelling enough.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Go pick up a copy of your local newspaper. Or the USA Today. Look at the images that accompany the stories. Now see how many of them are "news as it happens" images, besides planned events like sports or political functions. Very, very few. Pictures of traumatic events, captured as they happen, make up about 1% of a professional photojournalist does. Most of it is either:
These are the things photojournalists actually do, none of which are going to be replaced by random amateurs with point and shoot cameras. So, according to the author, photojournalists are going to be put out of a job by people doing something that photojournalists don't actually do. What's next? Are vending machines going to put gourmet chefs out of business? They're everywhere, and get you fed for a lot less!
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Some photographers are famous and produce pictures that form the rememberance of our times or even lead to change by altering public opinion. I can think of three pictures that went a long way to souring the public on our wars in Viet Nam and Cambodia.
t ml "The 12 or 14 negatives on that single roll of film, culminating in the moment of death for a Viet Cong, propelled Eddie Adams into lifelong fame. The photo of the execution at the hands of Vietnam's police chief, Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan, at noon on Feb. 1, 1968 has reached beyond the history of the Indochina War - it stands today for the brutality of our last century."
_ Ph%C3%BAc ". Associated Press photographer Nick Út earned a Pulitzer Prize for the photograph."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings "John Filo's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Mary Ann Vecchio, a fourteen year-old runaway, kneeling over the dead or dying body of Jeffrey Miller, shot in the mouth by an unknown Ohio National Guardsman."
http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0410/faas.h
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phan_Th%E1%BB%8B_Kim
As far as I know, these photographs were the high point of otherwise unremarkable careers. By luck, the photographer was in the right place at the right time.
On the other hand, through skill, there were photographers who always managed to be in the right place at the right time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Eisenstaedt There will always be jobs for photographers like him no matter how many cell phone cameras there are.
Take a look at graphic design. I think it's a pretty good parallel to what's happening in photography (my SO is a graphic designer, so I have some insight into this).
There used to be a lot of graphic designers and it used to be that a lot of them made it their bread-and-butter business to do restaurant menus, business cards, leaflets - any kind of small scale, frequently revised job like that. It wasn't glamorous, but it paid the bills between the big jobs.
Then DTP happened. And when people could start churning out the simple stuff on their own, that marked gradually dried up. The truth is, while a menu for a neighbourhood joint designed and set by the owner and cranked out on a badly trimmed Kinko's machine is clearly inferior to what a professional will do, it is good enough. The price premium a professional will charge (and has to, to stay in business) just isn't worth it, no matter how much better the results.
For a lot of graphic design like that, the cost of entry - and the baseline quality you get - for interested amateurs is compelling enough that there is no price point at which you can make a living churning out the stuff anymore. The market for "pro" work has shrunk substantially even as the total amount of work has increased. The high-end jobs are still there, naturally, but those were a pretty small proportion of the whole job market.
I suspect it is the case with stock photography and some news and feature photography as well. There's enough people doing decent enough work and selling it through cheap stock agencies - or licensing it completely for free, just for bragging rights - that the bottom will fall out of those markets as well. Just as for graphic design, the high-end stuff will still be there of course - and is arguably even more important than before - but not that many people will be able to make a living on doing it. The top, the cream of the crop, will be just fine. The journeyman base, however, will probably not be very large anymore.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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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