Chicago is one of the first big cities in the world without a printed daily newspaper. What sounds surprising is just the peak of a crisis journalism in total is coming in right now. There is maybe no newspaper in the world who is not suffering from the lack of advertisments and the new fast ways to share information through the internet. And no one has a concept yet how to make money with providing news in the internet. For sure, journalism in total is at a tipping point. Are journalists the pro bloggers of the future? And who should pay for this at the end? No one seems to have an answer about that right now. But what are the main problems?
The existence of journalism in my mind is based on three main points. The first one is simply: Journalists are at places where others don’t have access to. They provide news from places you would otherwise not even hear about, and that could be in the backroom of a politician or in warzones. The second point is knowledge about the topics, others could not provide. And the third one is the natural filter and the way to put together the important information.
All these three are not existing anymore or at least not to the extend it was. The internet changed the way we get information dramatically. One example is the micro-blogging service twitter. The first information from the plane crash in the Hudson river was found there- by someone sitting in the plane. The after-election clashes in Iran was mostly published through Twitter, Youtube and the likes. And with journalists not allowed to go on the streets, it was for days more or less the only information about it. So coming back to point one, the information going out by anyone, everywhere. We live in a time of total exposure. When politicians start to twitter, to blog the background information only the journalists got before is losing it’s weight. And why doing an interview with a scientist, when he is posting all this through the internet? So is the proper knowledge about the topic still needed by a journalist to do an interview? And what about a filter, one of the things i consider one of the most important points in journalism? Where is the filter when online news magazines do live writing online from press conferences or events, nothing else than a live blog? Journalism is in a crisis for sure.
But what does that mean for photojournalism? Who will fund that if the most powerful pictures are sometimes done with handycams from eyewittnesses of the event? It’s getting more difficult as well, even when the power of pictures will last longer in my opinion and powerful pictures from events and crisis are important and will always be needed. Maybe the question is if photojournalism or journalism in total trys to speed up with the rest and trys not to get lost in this or it will change to more telling long term stories, getting away from focusing on news events to telling stories and putting things in perspective. Deep long term stories might be the future of photojournalism, combining the three points mentioned before again. Good times i’d say! There is a big chance in this changes for sure.
The last point is about the presentation of the content. With the internet getting more and more important and playing a bigger and bigger role, there also has to be found new ways to present the stories. And also in this there is a big chance living in that. For the first time the combination of film and pictures and orginal voices of the people who’s stories you tell makes really sense as a way to provide the stories to a big visual-orientated audience. And the new technical improvements on photocameras support that with HD-Video in most new cameras, allowing to bring together high-quality pictures and high-quality film with one device. Good times!
The Bombay Flying Club, a group of enthusiast photojournalists from Denmark and Canada, made exactly this. They combined film and pictures with orginal sounds and interviews, stepping far back in there role as journalists, letting the people tell their story directly. Film has the big possibility to filter the information on the one hand, but at the same time let the people directly tell their stories. Wasteland is a stunning piece, combining the new possibilities in a great way. The future of photojournalism?
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[...] cray thing about it is, that in this two years technique changed so much, so fast. As said in the post about photojournalism, new DSLRs feature mostly also HD video, giving it the possibilty to create this unique look what [...]