Photographers at a recent industry forum said it was the best of times and the worst of times for their craft.
Last month a bunch of journalists gathered upstairs in a Sydney hotel to hear from two of the world’s most prestigious photojournalists, to see some of their work and to talk about the future of their craft.
In many ways the second Media in the Pub, a regular discussion hosted by a pair of Sydney journalists and supported by the Alliance, was an inspiring evening. Wen Huang started out with Xinhua in 1989 and has a lengthy and impressive CV, including a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University in the US and twice judging the World Press Photo awards. David Dare Parker has worked for pretty much everyone, here and around the world – including Le Monde, Stern, L'Express, Focus, Australian Geographic, The Bulletin, The New York Times, Fortune and Time Australia.
So when the pair of them talk, it pays to listen.
What they had to say was exciting, inspiring and disquieting. Just like any other discussion of journalism at the moment. The evening kicked off with a presentation of some of Dare Parker’s recent work in Indonesia and Timor, culminating in a short film he made recently of the reburial of Falintil fighters in Dili, which he shot on a Nikon D300S, a brand new pre-production stills camera that also shoots video. He shot in colour but subsequently converted it to black and white. Interspersed with the footage were colour stills shot on a separate camera, a Nikon D3.
The effect of his montage was moving and powerful, particularly against a backdrop track of natural sound and music. This was a one-man show, filmed, recorded and produced in the field.
For many, this sort of thing is the future of photojournalism – freelancers, self-funded, getting the shots, the footage on a speculative basis and making their living where they can.
We took a break, and I shared a beer with some old friends and colleagues, all photographers on metro and national newspapers. Their attitude was that this was all very inspiring, but when your working life consists of racing from one city office to another to shoot men in suits, six or seven jobs a day, the job satisfaction soon begins to wane.
These were people who have won prizes for their work: talented, courageous, tenacious photographers who have risked their necks all over the region to bring us stories. Now they feel like thoroughbreds pulling coal carts.
As Dare Parker said, “One of the main reasons a lot of us are staying freelance is that it gives us that opportunity to go out and do these stories.
“But it’s getting harder – in the early days you could usually pick up a guarantee from one of the news magazines, but in Australia particularly, since Time magazine closed its Australian office and The Bulletin folded, there are less places that will buy your work.”
Meanwhile back in the main room, Wen was talking about the fast-growing popularity of the concept of the MoJo, the mobile journalist whose kit includes a convertible stills/video camera, a laptop for writing and editing and a high-quality sound recorder for interviews and podcasts. She showed us several examples of this, including – ironically – a very pacey multimedia piece from China featuring a stills gallery, video interviews and text, all about the demise of the traditional newspaper.
“It’s quite rough,” Wen said. “But this is what a MoJo can put together in one day after receiving just five days’ training.”
For a writer, who has never taken his own photos, it struck me as a powerful possibility. But as one of the photographers in the audience was quick to point out, if you try to do all of these things at once, surely the performance of all of these disciplines is going to suffer? When are you going to get the time to do the groundwork to find and break new stories?
Wen’s talk highlighted the sad duality of any discussion about modern journalism. Yes, there are fantastic possibilities for journalists to do their work in ways they could only have dreamed about 10 years ago. We can reach more people than ever before. Using social media, news organisations can pull in stories from eyewitnesses around the world that they simply would never have been able to get – The Guardian’s recent live blog on the Iran protests in August was a case in point: the paper pulled in footage from YouTube and stills from Flickr and appointed an editorial team to monitor blog posts and coverage from all around the world to provide a live breaking news experience over several days.
No longer was the story a series of static snapshots. It was truly live and interactive as their audiences contributed news, tips and their own photos.
But it only involved the work of a couple of journalists – the ones sitting in The Guardian’s office, aggregating all the free content. Wen admitted that with smaller editorial budgets and the availability of cheap alternatives from “citizen journalists”, the environment was getting tougher for photojournalists. She couldn’t offer an easy solution, instead urging all of us to concentrate on picking up as many of the multimedia skill sets as possible.
But what’s in many people’s minds as we crisscross the country with the Future of Journalism roadshow is the seismic shift in thinking that will be needed to redefine what journalists have to do if they want to make a living from the business.
Will we be content creators: still out chasing stories, getting the best pictures, doing the job we’ve done for 200 years or more, but harnessing new technology to make it more vivid, effective and timely? Will we be content aggregators: figuring out ways of using other people’s free material and packaging and marketing it in a way to harness the biggest and most lucrative audiences?
My heart says the former, but the recent announcements of yet more catastrophic losses to big media companies around the world suggest the latter is a more likely scenario.
Or perhaps we’ll all be a bit of both, with a large dose of small businessperson thrown in – possessing not just multimedia skills and marketing nous, but the innovation of an entrepreneur and the financial acumen of an accountant.
And who will correct our spelling then?
Jonathan Este is director of communications for the Media Alliance and contributing editor of The Walkley Magazine
