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THEORY: "Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory" Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory By: Alan Trachtenberg, Social Research, Saturday, March 22, 2008 "I don't know why a Replicant would collect photos - maybe they were like Rachel - they needed memories." In the role of the bounty hunter Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott's 1982 cult classic, Blade Runner, Harrison Ford utters these words with a bitter edge. Assigned to "terminate" the beautiful Rachel, an "android" especially menacing because she's almost (almost!) indistinguishable from a "real" person, Deckard lusts after her and wants to be sure she's human, not machine-made, before bedding her. Based on Phillip K. Dick's brilliant science fiction novel of 1968, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the film adds the bit of sentiment about collecting photographs to the otherwise unmitigated darkness of Phillip Dick's vision of a near future. The year is 2021, and by means of mechanical replication--the electric sheep of Dick's title--warm-blooded animal life has been all but totally replaced by replicants, copies or duplications of almost forgotten originals. Memories of real sheep and toads and living human flesh are struggling against the irresistible tide of a programmed second-order reality unburdened by personal or cultural memory.

David Simon Blasts Citizen Journalism, Prescribes Non-Profit Newspaper Model We listened to articulate, qualified, high-minded participants in Sen. John Kerry's subcommittee hearing on the bleak future of journalism this week (as his hometown paper, The Boston Globe, struggles to stay afloat). One who impressed most was longtime Baltimore Sun cop reporter David Simon, who parlayed his journalism experience into a thriving career as a top TV drama producer. His venerated shows (including HBO's "The Wire") often investigate thorny journalism issues.

Ryan Sholin on the future of newspapers, online news and journalism education. How I share: A tour of my personal linking behavior May 12, 2009 Things you may have noticed about me in recent days, weeks, months, or years: 1. I don't write blog posts as often as I used to. 2. I share links all over the place, and I have for a long time now. 3. I have a new job that involves a lot of thinking about best practices for journalists who link to content they don't produce themselves. With those three things as givens, what follows is an exploration of how I share links. If I ramble off on some tangent, feel free to jump in and stop me. [Sidenote: You can't jump in. Is there a WordPress plugin for paragraph-by-paragraph commenting yet?] Let's start with a list of links to all the places I share lists of links, and a brief explanation of what sort of links I share there:

2005 and 2006 saw the popular recognition and commercial embrace of a phenomenon which is set to deeply affect the intellectual life of developed and developing nations for years to come. Yahoo! bought Flickr. Google acquired YouTube. Rupert Murdoch purchased MySpace, and declared the future of his NewsCorp empire to lie in the user-led content creation spaces of such social software Websites more than in its many newspapers, broadcast channels, and other media interests (Murdoch, 2005). Finally, TIME broke with its long-standing tradition of nominating one outstanding public figure as 'person of the year', and instead selected 'you': all of us who are active in collaborative online spaces (Grossman, 2006).

In Flat Earth News, award-winning journalist Nick Davies takes the lid off newspapers and broadcasters, exposing the mechanics of falsehood, distortion and propaganda; naming names and telling the stories behind stories. This website is intended to be a focal point for exposing past, current and future media abuse.

"Unmasking Photo Opportunities, Cubistically In a 1994 photograph we see U.S. soldiers invading Haiti, lying on the airport tarmac pointing their rifles at unseen enemies. The heroic image supports the claim of the U.S. government that it is invading to support democracy, liberating a neighboring country from a dictatorship. The curious reader [of the future], however, might want to place the computer cursor on the image. Another photograph appears from beneath it; it is of the same scene but from another vantage point. U.S. soldiers are pointing their guns not at any potential enemy but at about a dozen photographers who, lined up in front of them, are photographing them. In fact, the photographers are the only ones doing any shooting."

"On the Internet, everybody is a millenarian. Internet journalism, according to those who produce manifestos on its behalf, represents a world-historical development-not so much because of the expressive power of the new medium as because of its accessibility to producers and consumers. That permits it to break the long-standing choke hold on public information and discussion that the traditional media-usually known, when this argument is made, as "gatekeepers" or "the priesthood"-have supposedly been able to maintain up to now. "Millions of Americans who were once in awe of the punditocracy now realize that anyone can do this stuff-and that many unknowns can do it better than the lords of the profession," Glenn Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor who operates one of the leading blogs, Instapundit, writes, typically, in his new book, "An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and Other Goliaths." The rhetoric about Internet journalism produced by Reynolds and many others is plausible only because it conflates several distinct categories of material that are widely available online and didn't use to be. One is pure opinion, especially political opinion, which the Internet has made infinitely easy to purvey. Another is information originally published in other media-everything from Chilean newspaper stories and entries in German encyclopedias to papers presented at Micronesian conferences on accounting methods-which one can find instantly on search and aggregation sites. Lately, grand journalistic claims have been made on behalf of material produced specifically for Web sites by people who don't have jobs with news organizations. According to a study published last month by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, there are twelve million bloggers in the United States, and thirty-four per cent of them consider blogging to be a form of journalism. That would add

"Now this is going to be fun…. We're excited to announce our first batch of Wordpress + PhotoShelter plugins that allow you to: 1. Integrate your PhotoShelter photos and galleries into your Graph Paper Press themes for Wordpress 2. Allow your visitors to search your PhotoShelter photos from your site's sidebar 3. Pull in your PhotoShelter gallery updates into your site's sidebar If you are a photographer who uses PhotoShelter, these integration plugins will enable you to manage your portfolio, blog, and PhotoShelter photos and galleries all from one site. The combination of Wordpress, PhotoShelter and our themes and plugins will push your web presence into the future, allowing you to connect with clients, promote, sell and license your work all from one place."

great interview with Matt Slaby of Luceo on A Photo Editor

Part 1/6 - "From Refugee Photographer to War Photographer." Ashley Gilbertson photographs the war in Iraq for the New York Times. He talks about the invasion of Iraq, the battle for Falluja, the Marines he worked with, post-traumatic stress disorder, Iraqi civilians, and the future of photojournalism. His work is available in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War published by the University of Chicago Press. part 1 of 6

here is talk about a crisis in journalism, which generally takes the form of angst-ridden journalists, editors and news folk in general asking, "How do we maintain the commercial status quo without which journalism as we know it will be gone?" The question is sincere and extends beyond the fear of losing jobs; there is a genuine concern that the investigative and informative roles of the news media will be lost with a high cost to the civic health of our society.

Paolo Pellegrin has been widely regarded as one of the world's best photographers for a decade now, at least since he won the Kodak Young Photographer Award in 1996. But in a little over a year, Pellegrin has made a major breakthrough in his work that places him at the forefront of contemporary photojournalism.

"In the third of a series of articles on photojournalism Adrian Evans, Director of Panos Pictures, suggests that photojournalists should cast off the past and look to new models of funding. "Working in photojournalism it sometimes feels as though industry commentators are circling like vultures waiting to pick over the corpse of our industry. "They misguidedly link the fortunes of photojournalists to that of newspapers and magazines, referring to an almost mythical past, a golden age when newspapers were the champions and supporters of photojournalism. Whether this era ever really existed is debatable. What is undeniably true is that newspapers ceased being the paymasters of photojournalists a long time ago. Quality photojournalism is expensive - researching the story, gaining access, spending time with your subjects, post production and editing - there are no short cuts. Newspapers and magazines spend a tiny proportion of their income on content and they certainly don't want to spend it on photography."

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry's popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry's work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it. One of the people I was hanging around with online back then was Gordy Thompson, who managed internet services at the New York Times. I remember Thompson saying something to the effect of "When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem." I think about that conversation a lot these days.

The venerable profession of journalism finds itself at a rare moment in history when, for the first time, its hegemony as gatekeeper of the news is threatened by not just new technology and competitors but by the audience it serves. Citizens everywhere are getting together via the Internet in unprecedented ways to set the agenda for news, to inform each other about hyper-local and global issues, and to create new services in a connected, always-on society. The audience is now an active, important participant in the creation and dissemination of news and information, with or without the help of mainstream news media.

'If you can find a way to filter the occasional hot image from everything else, [then citizen journalism has a future]. But the wider you seek and the more you solicit, the more resources you're going to have to throw at the filtering "challenge". So I think the suck-from-wherever approach has to be the way to go rather than a dedicated agency like Scoopt.'

BJP article about failings of Scoopt. Claims he asked Janis Krums, who shot the first Twitt pic of the Hudson River crash whether he would have rather had $100K or 100K hits.

Talks about start up citizen photojournalism sites that were eventually bought by AFP and Getty. Scoopt founder Kyle MacRae talks about the how the model of his site, Scoopt, fundamentally will not work.