Future of Photography Questions Reconsidered

In regard to my previous questions about the stock photography and its roll in the future of photojournalism, I offer this revision. I will undoubtedly include stock in my final paper since I still am interested in the connection, but my new questions are: Do professional photographers have a place anymore in the face of citizen journalism, or are they destined to become disinter-mediated? The questions I have to ask more specifically are: Is there a way to become relevant and profitable as a photographer in a world covered by the untrained masses? Is the indifference to rights and usage a trend to be embraced? Is there a hierarchy of journalism that is emerging where the professionals take the bigger jobs and leave the rest to citizen photographers? Are the untrained masses providing the service of coverage that imaging professionals could benefit from not covering? Will there be a return to using photojournalists when the masses can’t provide successful imagery that tells the story in a photo? (A similar thing happened in commercial photography). What can a professional photographer offer that the non-professional cannot? Can future technology enhancements replace the “eye” of the photographer? Is composition and style programmable—and should it be? My answer to this question is of course a resounding no, but I hope to explain my position within my paper. While I won’t answer all of these questions, I plan to include them on my Photography Futures blog to see what response they may receive from others.

Here are some links to things I have found recently that are guiding my research.

The first is a link to a new wire service announced on a Flikr group for citizen photojournalists. The new wire service is called Demotix. They encourage citizen photographers to upload images to their site after which they broker them to the media--very innovative, but I am interested to understand if there is an editorial staff. An interesting side note--the Flikr Group has been pirated--some of their watermarked images were stolen by a band and used without permission on the band's website.

There was an article in Wired Called "Stock Waves: Citizen Photojournalists are Changing the Rules" in which another such brokerage company is listed. I believe this article is crowd-sourced. I am glad to see them using the technology to report on the effects of the technology. It is an edited piece from an experiment they were calling "Assignment Zero."

Following that same idea, there was an interesting point of view of a crowd-source contributor who writes as though in the act of crowd-sourcing, she was experiencing the same effects of professionalization that the pros have already surpassed. It seems to be inadvertently saying that she enjoys doing the job, but she wishes she was a professional. She is not a photojournalist, but this is a similar in response to an effect I saw in the commercial market when people felt empowered by digital camera technology. The article goes on the suggest that the need for citizen journalists was in response to the media's increasingly gaping hole of coverage. In other words, If you don't fulfill your primary roll, then replacements will come whether you want them or not.

Within the previous article there were various links to sites that are trying to instill this professionalization on the untrained masses. This is a good thing. I think they are trying to graft journalistic ethics onto the citizen journalist--the word combination "citizen journalist" still makes me shudder a bit. There is one source called News University and another called New Voices. Not really an article to read, but there is plenty to explore.

Finally, I searched for some additional information from one of Kathy's blog sources called the Digital Journalist. He had posted "The Coming Earthquake in Photography" in April of 2007 which I found informative in the formation of some ideas for my paper.