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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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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.
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.