Digital Photo Pro magazine has an interesting and higly topical article in its May-June edition. Ed Kashi, Dirck Halstead and Brian Storm give their thoughts on the future of photojournalism. The article starts off by asserting that " the age of traditional freelance photojournalism is no more. Newspaper and magazine markets are shrinking. Editorial budgets are at an all-time low. In these changing times, freelance photojournalists can still make a living and fulfill the calling to get the story out by adapting to a new paradigm."
The future is certainly in cyberspace, and almost every photographer now has a web presence, if not a dedicated website. This evolution requires new skills, chief amongst them the skill of story telling and the skill of adapting to new media and to new products. Photographers unable or unwilling to evolve will soon find themselves marginalized and without an outlet for their products.
Brian Storm is quoted as feeling the pulse of the industry shifting now toward multimedia storytelling, which is hugely satisfying for him. "I've been jumping up and down for almost 15 years now, trying to get photographers to think about multimedia and multi-platform storytelling, and gathering sound— the kind of things that maybe a photojournalist wasn't too keen to do before. Now I think they see it as a great opportunity to be authors of their stories, which is something I think we've been missing in our profession."
The full article is here.
