Group items tagged

I was confronted with the fact that traditional media was rarely publishing, let alone commissioning, long-form visual journalism. I saw the dearth of assignments as an opportunity that would force me to find different, and potentially more personally fulfilling, ways to reach an audience.

"I figured that if my primary goal was not to publish in traditional print media, then I should take on projects that were larger and demanded a broader platform. I began to investigate ways to finance those projects and avenues to distribute them. I began to look for grants to produce the work, but was equally interested in figuring out how to reach an audience outside of traditional media outlets in a way that could still have a significant impact.

I'm Phil Coomes, picture editor and photographer for the BBC News website. This is my blog where I'll be exploring the world of photojournalism, photos in the news and BBC News' use of photographs, including those by our readers.

our 'photo-op' culture, where much of everyday life seems picture driven and played out in front of the camera.

"As a professional practice, photojournalism has historically relied on two forms of scarcity. The first involved the scarcity of skills to make good images, and the second the scarcity of popular access to the dominant forms of print distribution, the newspapers and magazines. Both of these limits have now been fundamentally challenged.

"Amateurs are able to purchase and use the best camera technology to make striking photographs, and - although it is not solely responsible for the decline of newspapers - the transformative power of the Internet has reduced the cost of publication to near zero, thereby opening up new channels for the circulation of imagery. Together these transformations have produced a new era of abundant pictures.

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.

Success now lies in being multiskilled, merely taking photographs is not enough. My advice to aspiring photographers is that they need to be able to design a web page using html, know their way around a multitude of publishing software programmes shoot and edit video, record audio and most importantly research and pitch stories.

rather than sourcing funding from the print media or distributor of a story, photographers are working with organisations who have a message they want to disseminate.

"Yet we are the last stalwarts; my photojournalist friends at other mainstream newspapers say their travel budgets are gone. The LA Times, US News and Newsweek appear to be sliding towards bankruptcy; The Washington Post closed nearly all its foreign bureaux; Time is a shadow of its former self.

what is dead is not photojournalism - what is dead is the particular culture of photojournalism that supported us for the past 30 years.

new models for raising cash to do projects - the grants, agency workshops, Emphasis, the partnerships with NGOs (which I find troubling for reasons I won't detail here), and others. I myself am using Emphasis to raise money for a book project.