{"id":46552,"date":"2026-02-06T14:09:27","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T12:09:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/?p=46552"},"modified":"2026-02-06T14:09:27","modified_gmt":"2026-02-06T12:09:27","slug":"on-the-topic-of-vanishing-camera-operators-and-photographers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/on-the-topic-of-vanishing-camera-operators-and-photographers\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Topic of Vanishing Camera Operators and Photographers"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading Time: <\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> 3<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minutes<\/span><\/span><p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Petapixel has an article about how <a href=\"https:\/\/petapixel.com\/2026\/02\/05\/staff-photographers-at-the-washington-post-all-lose-their-jobs\/\">the Washington Post has fired all of its staff photographers<\/a> as well as three hundred journalists out of eight hundred. <\/p>\n<p>According to Le Chat by mistral &quot;The phrase &quot;Journalists write the first draft of history&quot; is most famously attributed to Philip Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post from 1946 until his death in 1963.&quot; It seems ironic that it is the same organisation that has almost halved its journalistic pool and removed all photographers from its staff.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/05\/business\/media\/washington-post-martin-weil-metro.html\">60 Years at the Washington Post<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/02\/04\/business\/media\/washington-post-layoffs.html\">Washington Post Lays Off More Than 300 Journalists<\/a><\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>The Paradox of the Paywall<\/h2>\n<p>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 &quot;you&#8217;ve reached your quota, or &quot;This is for paying subscribers. The result is that if I&#8217;m skimming news sources and I see the Washington Post or other paywalled sourced I think twice about clicking through.<\/p>\n<p>They&#8217;re losing audience share, not because of a lack of interest, but because they consider that if we&#8217;re not paying, despite being curious we are blocked. That&#8217;s where the NYTimes and their Gift articles have value. Other papers offer the same thing.<\/p>\n<p>I also noticed, via the NYTimes Android App that I could get a year&#8217;s subscription for eight dollars. The Guardian has an offer for 4 GBP per month if I remember the currency correctly.<\/p>\n<p>The point is that newspapers say they are losing audience share but they&#8217;re putting road blocks up for people who like to share news via social networks. <\/p>\n<h2>Content as Articles and Photographs<\/h2>\n<p>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&#8217;re undercutting the entire value of the product. This is a problem around the world.<\/p>\n<p>The NYTimes article wrote that &quot;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.&quot; As I wrote earlier, I visit news sites that aren&#8217;t paywalled. If a site is paywalled then we stop clicking through.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<h2>And Finally &#8211; Fragmentation<\/h2>\n<p>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&#8217;re paying into hundreds of little pots and it&#8217;s getting expensive if you want to follow specific individuals.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>And finally this is precisely why we need neutral public service broadcasters funded by the public to keep people informed, educated, and entertained.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"span-reading-time rt-reading-time\" style=\"display: block;\"><span class=\"rt-label rt-prefix\">Reading Time: <\/span> <span class=\"rt-time\"> 3<\/span> <span class=\"rt-label rt-postfix\">minutes<\/span><\/span>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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34803,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"federated","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20,48,25,9],"tags":[2472,898,33,558,785,7135],"class_list":["post-46552","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-observation","category-social-media","category-social-networking","category-tech-related","tag-camera-work","tag-current-affairs","tag-documentary","tag-photography","tag-video","tag-witnesses"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46552"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46553,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46552\/revisions\/46553"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.main-vision.com\/richard\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}