17 Replies to “Deep Impact”

  2. Times have changed. In general, photographers are no longer necessary, with electronic computer based optics. You don’t need a darkroom and film developing, you don’t need the etch tanks for printing. Look at almost all the pictures on the net. They are almost all non-film photography based. With the vast unwashed out there able to take pictures with their phones, we are getting many, many more pictures from which to choose. Not all of them will be worse than secured by a “professional” photographer.
    Sorry, all you professional photographers. Time marches on. You have been passed by. Now you need to really do an in-depth examination of what you do best, and develop a market of that.

  3. Dear Laid Off Chicago Sun-Times Employees:
    Welcome to the Obama economy you helped create.

  5. I hear there’s work for photographers at the Auto Trader and the Penny Saver. Bwaha!
    Best part, all you lurking journo-lefties? I helped make this happen. I have not subscribed to a newspaper in twenty years, haven’t had cable since 2004.

  7. 1. Good news photos require someone who understands and cares about what makes a good photo. That is why the old Life proverb “That a good photograph is worth 1,000 words”.
    2.The Chicago-Sun Times is attempting a youtube strategy of trying to justify tv ads because they have a video version of the story. Watching a poor video after having to watch a tv style ad takes much longer than simply reading a good story and glancing at a good photo or two.
    It is time inefficient for checking up on the days news. It’s also, so frustrating.
    If I wanted to watch television ads, I’d be watching television. The reason I’ve gone to the internet for news is for effective use of time and better quality. Also, I can choose what I want to read.
    Most news videos don’t have anything extra to add, though there is the odd exception like the Islamist jihadi in Woolrich, he had to be seen and heard to be believed. That was a citizen news video!
    In that case the jihadi clearly viewed Islam as at war with Britain while the news media spin and politicians spin are just as clearly in denial.
    The MSM is it’s own worst enemy. It destroys it’s own credibility.

  9. This was inevitable.
    #1. Newspapers IN GENERAL are dying, so why wouldn’t you get rid of photographers?
    #2. Digital cameras are FANTASTIC. Any schmoe can snap a picture and with full auto settings and rapid picture taking, you’re bound to find something that works even if you aren’t a pro. After all, how hard is it to snap a ribbon cutting or car crash?
    #3. The next to go will be videographers. We are in the era of i-phone journalism now.
    #4. Advice to anyone shooters in the news biz? Get out. Now. I saw the writing on the wall after Citytv did another round of layoffs in 2010 and got my medical training. There will always be people dying, but there won’t always be stations and papers willing to pay a living wage for something anybody can do.

  10. In Chicago, they’re still trying to tell themselves it was Conrad Black’s fault. He was bailing out of newspapers and got people a might bit more money than they would have gotten hanging on. All the big losses came after he was fired. I bought a weekend Edmonton Journal and I paid like $2.50 for what cost me 10 cents forty years ago. I think it was my last. Times move on.

  11. Reporters will be next but no problem, in the future all stories and photos will be generated by a new central news agency called ‘Obama News’ whose motto will be Let We’ll Tell You All You Need to Know.

  13. Next to go will be all the reporters – after all the papers can just print the unedited version of the press releases from various George Soros funded groups and the result will be the same….

  14. In a way it is a shame. I worked at a newspaper for a few years. The photographers (I knew two of them) took great pictures and took tremendous pride in their work. On the other hand, the reporters and editors largely phoned it in. So the best content in the newspaper was the photography. The reporting was largely drivel- badly written, badly sourced and badly edited.
    There is a reason fewer and fewer people are reading the broadsheets. It is not the photography. Rather it is the crappy reporting, editing and writing.
    Fifteen years ago, I enjoyed wading through a substantial weekend newspaper. Now I will not bother. Why fill up the recycling bin?
    It is a shame that the people who provided the best content were the first to go. At the paper I worked at, the reporters were given their own cameras. You can imagine how that went.
    Lastly, over time it is not the reporting on events we remember but the great photographs of those events.

  15. How timely, the Kansas City Red Star, just called to try and drum up business. Dropped them years ago and dropped the WSJ about a year ago as it is morphing into an arm of NYT. The msm is committing suicide.

  17. Ah yes, the old tactic of putting lipstick on a pig and assuming that people will mistake the pig for Sophia Loren. The MSM hasn’t a clue why people are leaving in droves for better sources of news and, IMO, replacing still photographs with videos is a retrogressive step.
    As Larry noted, video, unless it is of a subject that requires a video display rather than a still photograph, is a very inefficient means of transmitting information. TV has to be the greatest waste of bandwidth that was ever invented as the real information content of a newscast is only a few hundred bytes whereas the raw data takes up many megabytes. Before I stopped listening to TV completely, I hadn’t watched it for many years. I would listen to local newscasts and do something else at the same time. When the urge to shoot my TV became almost overwhelming, I turned it off for good. A well written newspaper will let a fast reader get the details of a complex story in under 1 minute, much faster for most of the fluff which passes as news nowadays.
    The idea that anyone can be a news photographer has some serious flaws. Most of the amateur photographs that get widespread distribution are analogous to sending out millions of monkeys with cell phone cameras and occasionally one of them will capture a newsworthy event. Having worked with professional photographers, I’ve seen them photograph the same event I have and their photographs are superior and it’s not just the fact that they have better equipment than I do. There’s definitely a skill there and, given that reporters often make up the stories they write, it would have been better to fire the reporters and keep the photographers. I view the additional processing that digital cameras perform on images as an increasing annoyance and am tempted to go back to film photography but first have to stop taking as many pictures as I currently do with a digital camera. On the last flight I took I snapped about 2000 images of clouds and landscapes whereas with a film camera I might have taken 60 photographs which would have been of superior quality.
    That said, I don’t think the newspaper is going to go under as likely there will soon be government propaganda in large amounts to fill the space previously consumed by photographs.

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