Can Photojournalism Survive in the Instagram Era?

When I was made redundant due to changing times, no one gave a toss. So photojournalists have no sympathy from me. They have been milking this unholy cow for years. The end is nigh. They have to "innovate" and this should mean get a different job like normal people and not fake it and photoshop it even more.

All this doesn't mean you world class artists and visionaries can't take phenomenal pictures and call them "images" any more.

It does, however, mean rational, intelligent people won't pay you so they can wait three days and see your picture on something that belongs on the bottom of a bird cage.

If you want to make a difference with your vast knowledge and scary talent, how about taking off your beret, getting off web sites where you waste your time insulting the intelligence of those that refuse to kneel before your imaging prowess, reconsidering before you call your critics idiots or worse, and do something meaningful with all that energy.

Go learn confocal microscopy or medical imaging. X-ray techs aren't bitter against crowd sourced imaging. Why? They do something relevant and useful.

Covering Watergate and "interpreting" the events is just not on any more. People think for themselves.

Bye!

If alls photojournalists do these days it take the same old photos we see in old picture books then why should they be paid? I can do the same with my iPhone and post it to facebook for free.

Yes it's a new era. But all the cost cutting from the newspapers will bite them in the ass. Of course a Tweet can beat even online news in our days. But journalism is about well documented facts. Most of what you read in the first hours on the internet is not news. It's only roumors. So yes people would pay to read the real facts, well documented, also visually documented. Cutting down the costs, loosing the visual impact and maybe soon the writting quality makes the payed newspapers ( printed or online) irrelvand in front of any other free blog that post an instagram image. Who will pay when they can get the same thing for free ?!

Laslo Moholy Nagy quipped " the illiterates of the future will be ignorant of the use of the camera and the typewriter alike .. " - an old but pertinent quote.

No one would ever claim that knowing how to type makes you a writer nor should we accept that having a camera qualifies the user as a storyteller except in a trivial way. Similarly, possessing images or finding and collecting them from the net is not knowledge or understanding that comes from reading them and critical thinking.

Ritchin is not championing the indiscriminate democratic potential of the web ... he is stating a problem thats needs a solution that is evolving as we become more visually literate.

Newspapers are dead meat . It's amazing there is still people paying money to read day old news on paper that was made with toxic ink and paper made by chopping down trees . When the 777 crashed at SFO Samsung exec David Eun, a passenger on the Asiana Airlines flight posted photos on the internet as soon as he got off the 777. In a tweet sent at 12.13pm (PDT) Mr Eun said: 'I just crash landed at SFO. Tail ripped off. Most everyone seems fine. I'm ok ... surreal. He beat CNN by twenty minutes and forget about newspapers.

To compare Gary, Susan (im saying since there are links to these photographers) and etc with these instagram photos (specially the basetrack photo) is so ridiculous...these photos simply have so much PP to make it pop, that in the end the content simply doesnt matter...they look so fake...its not a matter if photojournalism can survive the instagram era...its the fact that the vast majority of people doesnt care nor understand what a good photo is...its all about what is in trend...BTW, journalists beware, you are the next ones...

Lol, anyone can take a good photo with some basic knowledge of your camera and something like 10 rules of photography.

Journalists are struggling for relevance.

Example: I cannot think of a more newsworthy or in fact important picture than "The Blue Marble" and that was taken neither by journalists nor photo pros nor artists.

There is a possibility that is being neglected, and that is that many in the media, at all levels within their respective organizations, may be self-aggrandizing imbeciles.

Consider the terrible Asiana airline crash at SFO. The quickest coverage came from mobiles. The traditional media then replayed the same images on a loop for hours whilst speculating to fill time and sell commercials. When a local TV station finally decided to break new info regarding the story, an entire newsroom full of people plus their management apparently didn't see anything wrong with telling viewers that "Wi Tu Lo" and "Sum Ting Wong" were among the crew...

So this is where we're at then: Privateer photos for news, old style media for comedic relief.

The media have gotten what they deserve.

Richin first suggests that ''many who are making cellphone images'' produce work that is ''more honest'', then he goes on to claim that the world needs ''curators'' to show us what is worth seeing in this ''overabundance'' of honest work.

Hallelujah brother. All we need now is a holy man who has been imbued with this divine power to ''curate'' to step forward and tell us distracted citizens what abridged version of truth we need to expose ourselves to.

Send us the bill.

There no way the cliche, meee-too pictures in the posted article can fly in today's youth-oriented social media world. Kids don't want to see, read, or watch Pentagon sanctioned propaganda from paid insiders and stooges.

Photojournalists, like almost any journalists, got scared, lazy and as a consequence irrelevant. You don't need to go to Iraq to get a good story. The corruption is through the roof right here. Get yourself a superzoom and shoot a local developer giving bribe to a local councilman, go to a local highschool and shoot drug dealers, go to DC area and shoot all those government contractors bribing GSA purchasing managers and DoD generals...

The dynamics of the marketplace have flipped 180 degrees among today's news media consumers. Whereas, in the days before the widespread availability of phones that were equipped with cameras and video capture capabilities, the consumer expected a very high level of image quality and story telling proficiency from the images that accompanied a news article; and that's why photojournalists existed. Today however, it's all about quantity of content instead of quality of content, and today's average news consumer, having been trained to accept this tradeoff through years of daily social media exposure, "i.e., facebook, etc.", is no longer aware of the difference. Yes, every once in a while, some good quality content from a neophyte image maker will get published, but the majority of content will simply garner bragging rights for the person who can get their garbage published first anywhere, just like on facebook. Garbage in, garbage out, is now the mainstream journalism standard.

Examine any centralized news organization and there are layers upon layers of managers, editors, politicians, and lawyers denying free expression unbeknownst to the public. This secretiveness is passe and has been rejected by mankind. The information market has beat down those who cannot compete in an open world. The dying traditional media companies are merging together desperate for the last bubble of air as they rapidly sink on a torpedoed ship. Journalists have to re-learn their craft with video, still, graphics, words, and social media. Then reappear in the workforce sans centralized editorial, advertiser, and government censorship -- free to compose, create, and submit their works to mankind. Otherwise journalists will not be able to compete in the information marketplace alongside billions of social media contributors.

Agh... The quality of journalism is going to he'll in a hand basket. Fred Ritchin is not spelled "Richin"

The centralized media model is a thing of the past. Cliche photography of pre-authorized subjects, which has been cleared and approved by higher-ups, are old, boring, and to put it mildly, a joke. A while back, technology empowered us. There's no going back. We are free.

As a photojournalist I feel Rush Limbaugh said it best regarding Newspapers:
Para phrase " They are going out of business due to bad business decisions, not incoming technology ".

Didn't one of the wealthiest businessman on the planet recently buy a string of 'Local' Newspapers?.

Remember this: Anyone attending a New York Philharmonic performance can know when a musical 'error' takes place, even though the listener may have no knowledge of 'Music'.

It is the same with Photojournalism. People know a good image when they see it. Whether captured by a 'Pro" or a 'Consumer'.

I produce on a continuous basis images that are 'good'.

The editors can not drum up enough 'Good' 'Consumer' pics to fill the paper on a continuous basis. There are only so many newsworthy moments and not every "Consumer' photographer knows how to capture the moment.

It takes 'Good' pictures to get the readers to buy the paper on a regular basis.

One reason why they do is my newspaper publishes my pictures.

It's all nice and well filtering interviews that show the current state of affairs under a benign light. Of course this 'citizen journalism' thing sounds pretty cool, but ultimately is just a pile of BS - the kind of BS CEOs like to impinge on us so we can accept the high unemplyment rates (in contrast with their obscene remunerations).
Unemployment is not an abstraction, nor something that only happens outside our door. Does anybody here know what it means to be unemployed? Did anybody here experience the despair of having kids to feed and having to let them go to school without a proper meal? Or facing the day you'll have to pay the rent or mortgage and having no money? Well, this happens in the real world, outside this shell made of cell phones that take "professional quality' (gasp!) pics and apps.
It is a serious matter. The fact that photojournalists endorse or mitigate it doesn't make it any better or more acceptable.
Sometimes we should give these matters some serious thought.

I don't understand why the word "Survive" is used in the referenced article. Instagram, Vine, Facebook, Twitter and social media are in the process of REPLACING centralized media organizations which today number in the 100s to 1000s eliminating archaic rules for *authorized* journalism. Social Media will further spawn new models, roles, and organizations which we cannot imagine today.

Asked about "video supplanting photography", he says, "A non-linear narrative that allows for increased complexity and depth, and encourages both subject and reader to have greater involvement, will eventually emerge more fully from the digital environment. This, in a sense, is the more profound democratization of media."

Whatever that means.

I think video is the real threat to the traditional photojournalist, not citizens. Still photography will eventually join B&W on the sidelines. The question is how long it'll take until that happens.

I'm 60 years old.
Print journalism is dead. Photojournalism will soldier on with paradigm shifts, as will written journalism, but not newspapers...