Photojournalism Disrupted

The View from Australia

Helen Caple

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429848803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Journalismus

Photojournalism Disrupted addresses the unprecedented disruptions in photojournalism over the last decade, with a particular focus on the Australian news media context.

Using a mixed methods approach, the book assesses the situation facing press photographers and their employers in the supply of professional imagery for news storytelling. Detailed qualitative case studies looking at special events and crisis reporting complement a longitudinal study of sourcing practices around everyday events. Additionally, interviews with industry professionals offer insights into how news organizations are managing significant structural change. Ultimately, the book argues that photojournalism is being reshaped in line with wider industrial disruptions that have led to the emergence of a highly casualized workforce.

As a comprehensive study of contemporary photojournalism practices, Photojournalism Disrupted is ideal for scholars and students internationally, as well as (photo)journalists and media professionals.

1 Introduction

A decade of disruption

There is not a single press photographer, photo editor, or photojournalism scholar who would dispute the fact that a well-crafted photograph makes you feel something, and it has long been stated that while people may forget what you say and do, they never forget how you make them feel.¹ These are dangerous words to begin a book about photojournalism with, but these are dangerous times for photojournalism. Photographs matter. We live in a world dominated by photographs. Almost every media text we engage with involves photographs. Digital storytelling is said to live or die by the photographs that accompany it, and digital storytelling is the coin that all news outlets now predominantly deal in.

1The original quote, “They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel,” is attributed to Carl W. Buehner.

In such an environment, one would expect professional photojournalists to be in constantly high demand. A few still are, but astoundingly, some news organizations are abandoning their photographers and replacing them with mobile phones, either in the hands of their wordsmiths (e.g. Chicago Sun-Times, see Channick, 2013; Anderson & Young, 2016, p. 298) or in the hands of the public (Anderson, 2013). Even more astounding is the thought that a stock photograph can do the work of a news photograph, yet this is being suggested by some well-respected journalism schools, with Poynter being a recent, if embarrassing, example (Hare & LaForme, 2018). After all, the photograph is just window dressing, an afterthought, a gap filler, right?

Wrong.

Press photographs are valuable content. Like the words that accompany them, press photographs are capable of carrying the full burden of news reporting (Caple, 2013). They need to be accurate, truthful, and accountable. Photographs need to be precise and specific so that they may educate and resonate. Just as well-crafted words will draw a reader into a story, an equally well-crafted photograph will encourage the reader to linger. To paraphrase one Australian photojournalist: Beauty, in a news photograph, not only makes you look, it makes you look for longer (David Maurice Smith at the Walkley Media Talks, Sydney, 2016). To this, I would add that when you look for longer, you begin to feel something.

As this book will document, photojournalism professionals and researchers are all in agreement regarding the importance of the news photograph. The question is, then, how have we arrived at the current situation, where both the photograph and the professional who makes it are being stripped of their hard-won value? Answering this question is the task of this book. It traces the disruptions that have precipitated the demise of the professional photojournalist, and importantly, it uses empirical evidence to assess whether the situation is as dire as these opening paragraphs suggest. Special focus is given to the Australian context, a very restricted market in terms of legacy news providers (Dwyer, 2016), which has been hit particularly hard by these disruptions.

Before embarking on this endeavour, however, a few points of clarification about the terminology used in this book:

Photojournalism refers to the act of photography production by professional photographers on behalf of a news organization and for publication as news reporting. I concur with Greenwood and Thomas’s (2015, p. 629) assertion that “an image should only be understood as photojournalism if it aligns with the roles and responsibilities one would traditionally ascribe to journalists in a democracy”. A photojournalist, press/news photographer would be the person tasked with producing photographs for publication in journalistic contexts.²

2When quoting or paraphrasing the research of others, I will maintain the terms used by them – e.g. Thomson (2018) uses the term “visual journalist”. For a broader definition of photojournalism, see Campbell (2013, p. 11).

Press/news/editorial photograph refers to the single still photograph produced by press photographers for publication as news reporting.³ Throughout the book, I use these terms interchangeably, along with photograph or frame. In so doing, I am referring to the photography produced by photojournalists that is usually published at news websites and in newsprint in the reporting of unfolding news events.

3This excludes photographs that are also published in news contexts but are associated with opinion writing or sponsored content or advertising.

I use the terms image/imagery/visuals to refer to photographs (including generic/stock imagery) and other forms of visual representations (e.g. from screen captures or from video footage) produced by citizens and those who do not fall under the remit of journalistic endeavour, but which may at some point be published by the news media.

The book series in which this volume appears uses the term disruptions to signify the radical transformations in the journalism industry that have been precipitated by the intersection of digital technologies with the social, cultural, and financial conditions that are able to take advantage of them. The scale and pace of these transformations disrupt “settled understandings and traditional ways of creating value, interacting and communicating both socially and professionally and […] trigger changes in the business models, professional practice, roles, ethics, products and even the accepted definitions and understandings of journalism” (Franklin, 2018). Campbell (2013, p. 7) further notes that disruption “is a product of more than competition alone, and occurs when technology transforms the economy”. For the news media industry, the transformative effect of these disruptions has been exacerbated because “the arrival of the internet did not herald a new entrant in the news ecosystem. It heralded a new ecosystem, full stop” (Anderson et al., 2014, p. 83). This new ecosystem is one dominated by the digital screen, and it affects all aspects of news storytelling. It is an ecosystem that many news organizations sought to incorporate into traditional business models, rather than create separate, new business models that respond directly to this disruptive threat (Allworth, cited in Benton, 2012). As is well-known by now, the consequences for the legacy news media have been devastating.

In the remainder of this chapter, I document the disruptions that have led to the current highly precarious position of photojournalists and the ongoing undermining of their craft.

A decade (or more) of disruption for photojournalism

Professional journalism in the twenty-first century has been marked by unprecedented disruptions in the form of institutional, technological, and social change. By and large, the industry response to such change has been to decimate staffing levels (Young, 2010; Skok, 2012; Zion, 2013) in the service of economic rationalism. Around the world, it has been the photography departments at news organizations that have been particularly savaged. In some cases, entire photography departments have been dismissed (e.g. Chicago Sun-Times, US), or depleted to skeletal levels (e.g. Sydney Morning Herald, Australia). In fact, the tenured staff position of the press photographer has been all but eradicated (Anderson, 2013; Allan, 2015; Thomson, 2018). There is not a single example of a news organization dismissing all of its writers and requiring its photographers to now provide both words and images. Yet writers are routinely called upon to capture images to go with their words, most often using a mobile phone (see Chapter 5). The implications of such disruptions are not to be underestimated, both in terms of the status afforded professional photographers and the photographs that they produce, and in terms of the values associated with the images that are likely to be used in their place. In the following paragraphs, I detail global trends in relation to the institutional, social, and technological disruptions of recent decades before honing in on the Australian context and the effects that these disruptions have had on this particular market. While these are disruptions that have affected the journalism industry more broadly, the purview of this volume is to focus on these disruptions in the context of photojournalism.

Disruptions of a global scale

The US, UK, and Australian news media industries are experiencing the most serious contraction in their histories (Zion, 2013; O’Donnell et al., 2016; Pope, 2018; Thomson, 2018; Young & Carson, 2018). In the US, for example, newspaper employment has fallen by more than 50 per cent (Greenslade, 2016; Pope, 2018), while in the UK, the net loss of local newspaper titles stood at 228 between 2005 and 2017 (Kakar, 2018). In Australia, more than 3,000 editorial jobs have been lost in the last decade (MEAA, 2018, p. 4). Many news organizations continue to struggle to find sustainable business models that can replace the “rivers of gold” (Macnamara, 2012; Simons, 2012; Skok, 2012) that once financed the production of editorial content.⁴ As a result, many media companies now run on skeletal staffing levels wherein the multiskilled news worker may be required to take on any or all such tasks as researching and gathering information, interviewing, and capturing images and sounds, to editing/producing, packaging, and publishing stories for print, web, and mobile devices. At the same time, the provision of content (both visual and verbal) is increasingly outsourced to news agencies (Gynnild, 2017; Láb & Štefaniková, 2017, p. 18).

4In the US context, print newspaper advertising revenue fell from about $60 billion to about $20 billion, between 2000 and 2015 (Thompson, 2016). And while one newspaper, The New York Times, was announcing a fall of 19 per cent in print ad revenue, Facebook, on the same day, was announcing a 59 per cent rise in its digital advertising revenue (Thompson, 2016). A similar picture emerges in the Australian context where newspaper advertising revenue has dropped 40 per cent in five years (Feik, 2017, p. 26). In Australia, the online advertising market was estimated to be worth $6 billion in 2017. However, the lion’s share of this ($4 to $5 billion) would be generated by Facebook and Google (Feik, 2017, p. 26). According to figures cited in the issues paper [released on 26 February 2018 by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission and seeking feedback on issues relevant to its Digital Platforms Inquiry], from 2011 to 2015, Australian newspaper and magazine publishers lost $1.5 billion and $349 million, respectively, in physical print advertising revenue, but only gained $54 million and $44 million in digital advertising (Taylor, 2018). On a global level, the two tech companies, Facebook and Google, are said to be picking up 80–90 per cent of all new digital advertising (Feik, 2017, p. 26).

In relation specifically to photojournalism, a similar picture emerges. In the US, the job market for “visual journalists” was more than halved between 1999 and 2015 (Thomson, 2018, p. 803). As Thomson (2018, p. 803) notes, the ratio of reporters to photographers at The Wall Street Journal in 2015 was 2,000 to 1. Equally devastating is the fact that memberships in professional associations (e.g. National Press Photographers Association [NPPA] in the US) have more than halved over the last 30 years (Thomson, 2018, p. 804). Membership numbers provided by NPPA, as of April 2018, stand at 5,200. Fifteen years ago, this number was approximately 10,000 (NPPA, 2018, personal communication). Similar reports have emerged from the UK, where both local and national newspapers have laid off almost all of their photographers (Greenslade, 2012), with expense being cited as a key motivation. Putting it bluntly, Donald R. Winslow (former editor of NPPA’s News Photographer magazine and website) states, “There are no patrons supporting photojournalism now. The patrons were newspapers and magazines. And they’ve cut off the money. That’s just the raw truth of it” (cited in Estrin, 2017). This point is not lost on the professional photographers either, as quoted in the State of News Photography report commissioned by World Press Photo in 2016: “The first act of violence against a photographer starts with the lack of financial and contractual protection by the company that is ‘hiring’ them” (unidentified photographer, cited in Hadland et al., 2016, p. 24).

The loss of financial support for photojournalism coincides with the burgeoning of free content accessible online. Some news organizations even blame the large-scale layoffs of photographers on the ubiquity of free imagery online (Lang, 2011, referring to CNN’s decision to lay off 50 photojournalists, technicians, and librarians). For a long time, researchers have noted the fact that citizens who witness major crises are now likely to not only film and photograph these experiences but also upload their imagery to social media platforms, where it can be readily accessed (often without cost) by news media organizations (Allan, 2013, 2015; Andén-Papadopoulos & Pantti, 2013, p. 960; Allan & Peters, 2015). In the context of breaking news, this new source of imagery poses a number of challenges to the news media industry. It has been widely acknowledged that citizens have little sense of journalism as they capture and share their personal experiences of what is happening around them (Pantti & Bakker, 2009; Allan, 2013; Becker, 2013). Rather, these images are “spontaneous, spur-of-the-moment responses, so often motivated by a desire to connect with others” (Taubert, 2012; Allan, 2013, p. 1). Neither are citizens governed by the same standards of ethics or credibility as professional journalism (Pantti & Bakker, 2009, p. 472). Thus, the imagery that they produce may be seen as a “non-conventional” or even “outlaw” view.

Such imagery may also bring with it different artistic and technical qualities, and a level of graphic/violent content (in victim imagery) not traditionally part of the repertoire of the professional photographer, who would usually be much later on the scene of a disaster and subjected to the usual restrictions imposed by the emergency services. Consequently, the rise in the sourcing of citizen imagery from social media outlets by the mainstream media has been matched by the rise in ethical, moral, and legal concerns (Zelizer, 1998, 2004; Sontag, 2003; Pantti & Bakker, 2009; Hoskins & O’Loughlin, 2010; Singer, 2011; Chouliaraki & Blaagaard, 2013). Given the concerns surrounding the use of citizen imagery at the time of disasters, news organizations that do publish such imagery routinely replace this with professionally produced photographs as soon as they become available (although the interviews conducted for this research study suggest otherwise – see Chapter 5). Likewise, the necessary and time-consuming process of verifying citizen imagery is also cited by interviewees in this book as a reason for not publishing such imagery (see Chapter 5).

Possibly the biggest threat to the tenured position of the professional photographer, however, is the practice of sourcing images from citizens for use in the everyday, routine reporting carried out by news organizations. This not only suggests that anyone can make photographs without the need for professional training or the need to operate within the professional ethical/moral guidelines that guide all other aspects of news reporting. It further reinforces the suggestion that there is little to no financial value associated with the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: a decade of disruption
• 2 Investigating visual sourcing practices: data and methodology
• 3 Bearing witness to events of national significance
• 4 Everyday photography: surveying the sourcing of photographs for routine reporting
• 5 The view from the inside: interviews with industry professionals
• 6 Professionals and amateurs: are we all in this together?
• Appendix
• References
• Index