The print media as seen a sea change over the past two decades from the typical newsroom sound of tapping tickers and typewriters, to the present day buzz of CPUs all humming to a technological conductor.
‘New Photojournalism’ has also seen an impressive change from the good old days of time-consuming film-based, dark-room processed and printed SLR camera photography to the present day digital time-saving D-SLR photography. This shift in technology has added more responsibilities to present day photojournalists, forcing them to give an increasing number of concept-based pictures to suit a report and ensure it has a clear edge over rivals in the newspaper market.
With fixed lens digital cameras and mobile phone cameras flooding the market in large quantities the age of the citizen photojournalist has truly arrived, and it’s here to stay, eventually replacing the professional news photographer.
Amateur photographers have been highly-prized for decades. Take for instance Abraham Zapruder’s motion pictures of the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963, which fetched him $150,000 in those days. Then you have the citizen photojournalism images taken of the London tube bombings where a citizen pulled his mobile camera to film people escaping from smoke-filled bogeys soon after a blast rocked London’s mass transport system.
In yet another incident a 17-year-old was paid a whopping $40,000 for a grainy image taken on his mobile, which was the first photograph taken of one of the cars used in the London bombings. It showed a Green Mercedes parked outside the Tiger nightclub in Haymarket, and next to it, one of the gas canisters that the car contained.
And now Reuters and Yahoo! have jumped on the citizen photojournalism bandwagon with gusto; in the hope of turning millions of people with digital cameras and camera phones into citizen photojournalists. These image will be distributed, through a special package, to hundreds of print, online and broadcast media subscribers across the world.
The professionals who deal in breaking news have a big problem on their hands in the future, one with which they can’t possibly compete. When the tools of creation and access are so profoundly democratised, the best professionals fight a losing battle to save their careers.
Like Kyle McRae the founder of Scoopt, one of the first citizen photojournalism online stock libraries (who later sold its collection to Getty images) had said: "Because the potential, or the reality, is that the first person on the scene is going to be you or me or somebody like us. It's not going to be a professional photographer or a news journalist. So it's not enough for you and me to dedicate the rest of our lives to chasing down news stories. We do need the power of the crowd."
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