It's easy to feel all warm and fuzzy about the future of journalism and photojournalism, following this year's major contest announcements featuring excellence in the field. However, the good feelings pass quickly after ruffling through the pages of the local newspaper.
Not surprisingly, it seems that most of the big time players, such as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, or the Washington Posts of the world, continue to walk away with the lion's share of these honors, while the rest of us have to read and look at content that seems to have been done by a hormone induced teen dribbling on MySpace.
The quality of news and information most of rural America gets is not the content of the winners. Even with the Internet, it would be nice to read the local news with a feeling of confidence that the material is correct and the reporters and photographers did their very best in producing it. Unfortunately, that's not always the case.
Smaller market newspapers cannot even come close to producing the quality of the A-Leaguers, but does this mean that those of us out in the boondocks have to live with whatever we are handed? To have to learn to settle for mediocrity? Five days out of 7, that's the way I feel when I step out onto the driveway at dusk to pick up our local newspaper. And it isn't just here in Southern Oregon, it could be just about any small town or city in America.
Why do we feel like we have to settle to for something less from local news -- including TV?
Is there some deep and disturbing cultural pathology at play in rural America that allows us to put up with more editorial mistakes and more poorly made images that do not improve over time?
Every time I threaten to cancel the subscription, I am stopped by the harsh reality that it is important to have at least some idea of what is going on in our community -- even if the content is, well, "less than" perfect. We learn to settle with mediocrity not only because we learn to tolerate it, but because complaining about it seems like an exercise in futility.
Now, it might seem like I am bashing my own hometown newspaper here, but the problems facing small dailies in America are universal. Small markets are famous for employing freshly trained, overworked, and underpaid people. Most small newspapers serve as farm teams for the A-leaguers, yes, but that doesn't mean that quality has to suffer for it.
Not all, there are exceptions, but a large percentage of what counts as daily journalism is far more mediocre than it is good.
Sarah Pink suggests, in her book “Doing Visual Ethnography,” there has always been a high level of subjectivity not only in interpreting the meanings of images, but also in the making of them.
Pink contends that in “creating images that reproduce or reference ‘conventional’ compositions and iconographies, individuals draw from personal and cultural resources of visual experience and knowledge. They thus compose images that they intended to represent particular objects or meanings; moreover they do so in particular social and material contexts.”
Could living with mediocrity be a convention at smaller newspapers?
Pink’s argument is relevant to how images and news are edited, positioned, and displayed by today’s mass media.
The typical photojournalist’s independence and imagination is constrained by the conventions and standards of what is deemed acceptable by editors and audiences, or, in other words, what sells.
Today it is disappointing to open a newspaper and view what can only be thought of as a flood of mediocre pictures. It could be that photojournalists, are too overworked, too underpaid, or just too busy trying to create content for the web across multiple media platforms such as audio and video to make compelling and powerful images.
Whatever the excuse, much of what we see in print seems forced, conventional, but most of all, it's just mediocre in every sense of the word.
The transition from print to digital display appears to be sucking the life right out of photojournalism. Newspapers are cutting staffs and trying to do more with so much less. Despite all the potential new technologies offer us, it is the content -- the stories and pictures -- that remain paramount.
Why shouldn't people living in smaller markets -- out here in rural America -- demand the highest quality information from their local newspapers? Maybe most of us just don't know the difference or maybe we have just learned to live with it.