No news here, this one has been a long time coming.  Basically since the digital camera was made available to the masses and photographs started becoming a dime a dozen, it seems the cash value of photojournalism has been dropping.  Now compounded by the Internet and our current economic state things are really taking a hit.  It seems that the typical career in photojournalism as we have known it over the last 40 years or so may be ending.  I do think that photojournalism is growing faster by the day; only it happens to be unpaid and the photos were taken by “amateurs”.  An interesting turn of events and I am actually really excited to see how the creative professionals can respond.

A few quotes:

“Ten years ago, Dirck Halstead, who spent 29 years as a White House photographer for Time magazine, wrote in Digital Journalist: “When I speak of photojournalism as being dead, I am talking only about the concept of capturing a single image on a nitrate film plane, for publication in mass media.” Visual storytelling has itself been around since the Stone Age, he noted, and “will only be enhanced” by the changes now taking place.  Revisiting that column last month, Mr. Halstead wrote that, if anything, conditions today were worse than he had predicted. To be a photojournalist today, he wrote, “You have to be crazy.”

“Newspapers and magazines are cutting back sharply on picture budgets or going out of business altogether, and television stations have cut back on news coverage in favor of less-costly fare. Pictures and video snapped by amateurs on cellphones are posted to Web sites minutes after events have occurred. Photographers trying to make a living from shooting the news call it a crisis.”

Read the whole article HERE.