Dan Gillmor gets a lot right in his lengthy post The Demise of the Professional Photojournalist.
He needs to point only to the near future to imagine a time when cellphone-toting citizens will put the professional photojournalist out of business. The reasoning is simple and convincing: there will always be a lot more of us — the cellphone-toters — out there than the pros from the newsroom. Dan recasts Nov. 22, 1963 as a prime example:
Dozens or hundreds of people in Dealey Plaza would have been capturing high-definition videos of the assassination, most likely via their camera-equipped mobile phones as well as devices designed to be cameras and little else. They’d have been capturing those images from multiple perspectives. And — this is key — all of those devices would have been attached to digital networks.
If soon-to-be-ubiquitous technology had been in use back in 1963, at least several things are clear. One is that videos of this event would have been posted online almost instantly. Professional news organizations, which would also have had their own videos, would have been competing with a blizzard of other material almost from the start — and given traditional media’s usually appropriate reluctance to broadcast the most gruesome images (e.g. the Scot [sic] Berg beheading in Iraq), the online accounts might well be a primary source.
When it comes to news, or those cute feature pix, or the celebrity-of-the-minute, the pros really don’t (or soon won’t) have a chance. It’s not just the sheer number of the cellphone-shooters, it’s the ease of publishing: snap the pix, press a button and it’s on Flickr or a blog or at Scoopt or…. (I don’t think that specialties such as sports photography have a shiny bright future, either, but for different reasons. I’ll write about that later.)
Everything Dan writes applies, but I think he misses something: the ability of the professional photojournalist to tell stories.
News “shooters” may be ubiquitous, but far fewer will be the citizen photogs willing (or even able) to go in-depth, to string together the compelling series of images, to work the subject to capture the image, or video, that rises above mere showing to telling.
I’m not going to argue that only those shooters with press passes can do this. Evidence abounds on Flickr that there are talented, passionate storytellers out there. So do the best of the videoblogs. I will argue that storytelling takes time and energy and someone has to pay for that.
It’s that type of visual storytelling that I suspect will remain the province of the pros and the dedicated amateurs, even as news, sports, enertainment and even feature photography slowly slides out of the hands of the traditional newsroom.
TAGS: PHOTOJOURNALISM, RETHINKING MEDIA
