If you’ve been paying attention to the professional photography industry, you no doubt understand that times are tough and likely to continue getting tougher for newspaper photographers...
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This is the website for the senior-level Journalism Ethics course required of students in the Journalism Minor at the University of San Francisco. We are delighted that non-minors are among us this Fall.
2 comments:
What is the ethical dimension? Maybe 1) Bad photos taken by willing - but amateurish - reporters. 2) Photos missed by those reporters because they don't have time to get the image and the story. 3) Photos missed by those reporters because they do not have 'the eye.
In all three cases, the story is less than it could be - and possibly less truthful and possibly less attractive to readers/viewers. Maybe the story has less impact and thus undercuts basic journalism standards, most of which we think are ethical - matters of right conduct - at bottom.
But the other side of the coin is the ethic of survival. If you need to cut staff to survive, what staff do you cut???
This seems to be the trend of the digital era, where creative labor is outsourced to those who will work for nothing because they are “happy” to do it. (You can’t spell “internet” without “intern,” according to The New Yorker.) I’m not sure what that means for the future of photojournalism. I’d like to think there will always be a need for high-quality photography, but if news stations can get user-generated content like iPhone photos for free (there seems to be an emphasis on speed over quality), it seems like professional photographers will inevitably get left behind.
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