Dan Gillmor wonders if tourists carrying mobile phones in spot news situations will spur the demise of the professional photojournalist. Is it a leap to make that conjecture? The photos that most untrained folks take are painfully unpublishable but there are some undeniable truths in the tech rends.
From my own research:
Fact: For $239 you can buy a camera at Target that has a Leica Lens and a six megapixel chip. For $100 more you can get 10 megapixels. So amateurs in many cases are carrying devices that capture more megapixels than many pros newspaper photographers capture with their D1s. Pixels aren’t everything, I know, but it’s an important metric .
Fact: Readers of Norway’s VG newspaper were the first ‘journalists’ to transmit true and horrific spot news photographs from Phuket. Hours ahead of the wires.
The newspaper long ago made it easy for their readers to participate in the telling of spot news and the mobile phone that the average Scandanvian carries is very capable of serving as a stealth multimedia reporting tool. VG does pay readers for their pix AND they get credit.
If the coup in Thailand involved soldiers parading severed heads in the streats of Bangkok instead of flowers -I have to wonder - would there be enough amatuer photos of that news on Flickr for Yahoo! editorial teams to edit into a slide show?
Pro photogs are trained to document horror - often at extreme personal risk. Not sure the average tourist will feel the same compunction to document history with their mobile phone when their life is on the line.
So there are going to be times and places when amatuers take compelling photos of spot news events - but that has always been true. I just cannot see how amatuers wih digicams translates into the elimination of spot news images made by pros.
Your thoughts?
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Well, I would just suggest it broadens a publication’s ability to cover the community or area. A photographer or several can only be in one place at one given time. What separates the professional from the amateur is time available to do said task. We are journalists. We are paid to chase around these things. Most of the public is not. But when Joe Q. Public happens to be at the right place at the right time, he too can contribute. We as journalists aren’t going anywhere, but our reach will grow with Joe Q. Public’s journalistic contributions. I wouldn’t look at pubic contributions as competition, but rather as an augmentation.