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The uncertain future of the professional photojournalist

You may well have already read this interesting article and in some ways even more interesting commentary. But just in case you missed it, take a look at Dan Gillmor's article The Decline (and Maybe Demise) of the Professional Photojournalist (article published under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.)

I think he's stated the obvious when it comes to on-the-spot news. However as others have pointed out, merely recording the moment does not equate to journalism. I certainly do not feel threatened by ubiquitous image recording devices as there will always be a market for a sensitively told story in pictures and words.

My prediction is that we will see a polarisation between on-the-spot recording of events and high quality photojournalism. There's a market for both.

Feel free to leave a comment here too.

Cheers,
Paul

Comments

Anonymous said…
Funnily enough wearing my hat as a wanna be journalist I've been reading a lot of column inches about this subject recently.

The Register recently ran a simmilar article by Sion Touhig

The feedback to the article was sadly very negative it seemed to me people missed the point. It seemed the risks of healthy journalism being undermined went unnoticed. It also seemed anyone questioning the benefit of globalization of the media was dismissed out of hand. Still thats how we're programmed now I guess.

This is a risk that's well covered from another angle in this New Internationalist article on advertising and how it can clash with editorial content.
09:49
Beyond the obvious said…
Thanks for the interesting links and your input David. It's certainly a hot topic.

Cheers,

Paul
10:24
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