When people start talking about the demise of photojournalism, or the demise of anything for that matter, there is always cause for concern.
What becomes important to add to any discourse about the death of photojournalism is the ability to see the bigger picture and to evaluate the relationships between trends, patterns, and events in society. In term of changes in the media, there appears to be agreement that things are not the same as they were 10 or 20 years ago.
Photojournalism fits into this mix because the relationship between technological innovation and the media is increasingly visual.
We are a culture of information junkies. We are addicted to information; some of it even useful. We keep up with events by reading, listening, watching, surfing, grazing, and browsing for information that interests and entertains us.
Information is beamed, streamed, broadcast, emailed, snail mailed and channeled to us from around the world seemingly every second of every day.
The choices people have in terms of content and how to display this content is overwhelming.
Today we are swimming in a stew of images and words -- 5oo cable channels, videos, DVDs, satellite broadcasting, wireless Internet, and a bag full of personal media devices -- we’ve got 55 million websites to look at, 18 million blogs to read and a gazillion gigabytes of itunes to listen to.
According to a study by the Pew, Internet and the American Life project, young people -- ages 8-18 -- spend more than 8 hours a day consuming different forms of media. During the day nearly 3:51 will be spent watching TV, 1:44 listening to music, 1:02 on the computer, :49 playing video games, and :43 reading.
Of the time reading, only 14 minutes will be spent with newspapers.
In 2005, while traditional print newspaper circulations continued a 20-year decline newspaper Web sites grew 11 percent year-over-year to 39.3 million unique visitors in October 2005, comprising about one out of every four Internet users.
Readership habits are changing along with the technologies that provide news and information.
In an age of instant information, the ways in which people consume transforming and redefining news in unexpected ways. Along with the increasing speed and quantity of information available today, the ability alter the content of images is challenging the profession.
In recent years, there has been increasing concern about media credibility and a perceived lack of public trust in the practice of journalism. Photojournalism, as an eyewitness to history, has become an easy target for critics and skeptics.
The ease in which images may be seamlessly altered, along with the speed in which pictures can be transmitted across the Internet by just about anyone with a camera phone has presented some challenges for a profession that prides itself on maintaining public trust and credibility, through fairmindedness, accoutability, or to use the latest pop slang, “truthiness”.
The actually incidences of digital manipulation in photojournalism is small when compared to the volumn of pictures transmitted daily to U.S. newspapers and Websites. On average, photo services such as the Associated Press or Reuters produce, edit and transmit more than 5,000 pictures a day. But it only takes a couple of incidents to destroy public confidence.
Altering the content of images is not at all new to photography. What concerns people today, however, is the speed and ease in which changes to content can be made.
Beyond concerns about digital manipulation, there has been a lot of interest in citizen-sourced content impacting visual reportage. We are all familiar with the Rodney King beating video, prisoner abuse images from Abu Ghraib, and most recently the hanging of Saddam Hussein that was captured on a camera phone.
In my research and writing about the impact of camera phone images on the public’s perception of major news events, camera phone images, such as the execution video, offer indisputable proof that a paradigm shift is happening in the way news is gathered, disseminated and consumed.
In fact, every day shaky, grainy camera phone video and still images are blinked around the world on sites such as YouTube, Google, Liveleak, My Space, Flickr, and Facebook.
According to the London Times, “An almost blanket ban by television stations could not hold back the tide of people wanting to see the two-minute mobile phone footage.” In fact, within 24 hours more than a million viewers had watched the citizen-sourced account.
I am suggesting that a shift away from the legitimacy often blindly given to the mainstream media suggests the birth of a fledgling citizen-sourced news industry. This idea is still very much up for debate -- but one well worth having.
The camera phone video, from a sociological perspective, signifies the very human need to validate personal experience in ways outside the conventions of mainstream sources. The desire to make personal images public, as the execution video shows, is not a threat to mainstream media.
The popularity of “backdoor” citizen-sourced media should be a wakeup call to the mainstream. If mainstream media executives are paying attention, which is sometimes doubtful, they will learn that the public clamors for more transparent coverage of major news events.
Instead of worrying about offending advertisers by broadcasting the grim reality of Saddam’s demise without fading to black at the moment of death or censoring the snap of a dictator’s neck, the mainstream media would best serve itself by paying attention to the demands of increasingly fragmented audiences.
Now, Yahoo and Reuters news are inviting the public to submit camera phone images to be considered for distribution in their news cycles.
Does this mean the demise of photojournalism as some bloggers are suggesting?
No. But it does mean that photojournalism's obligation to its central purpose of bearing the burden of visual truth in an age of information and misinformation -- it means -- that the burden just gets a little heavier.