On the Topic of Vanishing Camera Operators and Photographers

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In the Age of the AI bubble, but long before this, photographers and camera operators have been vanishing from television studios as well as from events. Where you would have hired a camera operator and video editor you now hire a video editor/graphist because video editing has moved from editing video footage to creating graphics filled videos. This is part of why I became disenchanted with video and why I pivoted towards media asset management and self-hosting.

Petapixel has an article about how the Washington Post has fired all of its staff photographers as well as three hundred journalists out of eight hundred.

According to Le Chat by mistral "The phrase "Journalists write the first draft of history" is most famously attributed to Philip Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post from 1946 until his death in 1963." It seems ironic that it is the same organisation that has almost halved its journalistic pool and removed all photographers from its staff.

60 Years at the Washington Post

Washington Post Lays Off More Than 300 Journalists

The Paradox of the Paywall

The NYTImes, Washington Post, The Atlantic and The Guardian, to name just a few newspapers have a problem. Via the Google News app, and social networks we often click through to read articles from all of these papers, only to be told "you've reached your quota, or "This is for paying subscribers. The result is that if I'm skimming news sources and I see the Washington Post or other paywalled sourced I think twice about clicking through.

They're losing audience share, not because of a lack of interest, but because they consider that if we're not paying, despite being curious we are blocked. That's where the NYTimes and their Gift articles have value. Other papers offer the same thing.

I also noticed, via the NYTimes Android App that I could get a year's subscription for eight dollars. The Guardian has an offer for 4 GBP per month if I remember the currency correctly.

The point is that newspapers say they are losing audience share but they're putting road blocks up for people who like to share news via social networks.

Content as Articles and Photographs

Newspapers are about content, and when you fire the content creators, whether they are written journalists, editors or photo journalists. then you undermine the value of a newspaper as a source of information. You're undercutting the entire value of the product. This is a problem around the world.

The NYTimes article wrote that "The Post is far from alone among publishers in its struggles to achieve profitability. For many outlets, print circulation has continued to nose-dive, digital traffic has been hampered by generative A.I. and audiences have splintered to various social media platforms." As I wrote earlier, I visit news sites that aren't paywalled. If a site is paywalled then we stop clicking through.

I use Google News, rather than social media for news, and I notice that news shared on sites like Facebook is sensationalist and polarising, rather than factual and relevant. This is why I avoid FB, Threads, Former Twitter and other sites.

And Finally - Fragmentation

To a large degree we are seeing fragmentation. Journalists with visibility are moving to Substack and other alternatives and self-publishing, and encouraging us to contribute to their individual feeds. Instead of paying into a single big pot, a newspaper, we're paying into hundreds of little pots and it's getting expensive if you want to follow specific individuals.

This proves two things. First, that if newspapers and broadcasters had held on to these people they could have created a new subscription model based on individual journalists, rather than a bulk subscription.

And finally this is precisely why we need neutral public service broadcasters funded by the public to keep people informed, educated, and entertained.