Do you think photojournalism, as it is now, can survive with the "expected" death of newspapers? Do you think it would be foolish for someone to attempt to make it in photojournalism at this point in time?

(I ask because I want to be a photojournalist, but I'm worried. Worried that I'll put time and effort and money into trying to be one, and then "something" happens and people start buying a significantly fewer amount of pictures than they do now, or photojournalist jobs start disappearing, or something else that scares me.) — roavl

Hi Jesse,

Thanks for asking this question and let’s start with a giant caveat: 

While I’ve published photos, I am not and have never been a photojournalist. Instead, my photos were “good enough” to accompany whatever story I reported at the time.

What I will say though is that I have a number of friends who are photographers and I want to tell you their stories. 

Before I do though, let’s get a harsh reality out of the way, and that reality runs like this: as much as traditional writers bitch and moan about a digital world passing them by, photojournalists currently hold the the shortest end of the editorial stick. The market for dedicated photographers on particular stories has, unfortunately, contracted.

Instead, many news organizations demand that a single reporter heads out with an arsenal of devices when covering a story. This can mean pen and paper, camera, video camera and audio recorder. And many — but certainly not necessarily all —  can produce “good enough” content that the newsroom can run.

Add to this images that come through via Creative Commons and citizen journalism reports from hot spots around the world and newsrooms are, and have been, sourcing their visual needs to those outlets rather than sending traditional photojournalists.

All of which is to say that the outlook for a traditional photojournalism career looks grim in an age where “good enough” images are created via smart phones and used with regularity.

That, Jesse, is the negativity that I’d like to drop on you today. 

But I’d like to counter that with some positivity and perhaps some strategy as well.

First, let’s look at who we are and who we are is a story-telling species that’s also very much a visual species. Yes we want to know the facts of the day. We also want them wrapped up in images and understandable graphics that translate the news to us just so. 

So there’s this tension going on in the newsroom right now. This tension is between using the “good enough” photo, using this image posted to the social network from the event that wants to be covered, and sending someone like you in. 

You’re a control group though. And if you can get the gig and we send you in, we know what we’re going to get in return. We know we’re going to get kick ass images that we’re going to run and be proud of and our audience will pass them around and say Jesse’s a kick ass photographer who helped us understand the here and now so much better than we otherwise would have understood it. 

And you will be thanked and praised as well you should be.

I don’t want to undersell the disruption going on in photography though so let’s talk strategy. Getting thanks and praises does, after all, require getting the gig in the first place.

I’ve mentioned that I have a number of photographer friends. Here’s by and large what they did in the early parts of their careers: they shot both advertorial and editorial. They assisted established photographers who’d gotten the big accounts with the big agencies and they made their money and saved their money so they could take lesser paying editorial jobs. 

You know what else they did? They learned every camera and every lens they might ever come across on every shoot they were a part of. They also took time after long 12 hour days to go out and shoot images of their own. Some of them were then able to sell those images to stock house in order to get some recurring revenue during the weeks and months when they weren’t on commercial jobs.

They also learned audio and video and how to edit that audio and video.

And then they used those skills and that knowledge and applied it to newspaper and magazine work that they also really wanted to do.

In a sense, and out of necessity, they became multimedia journalists and entrepreneurial journalists. And while photography is your foremost passion, take the time to learn these other skills. Take the time be a “good enough” videographer and writer and audio producer. And if you have some time and patience, throw in some code and graphics work as well. 

We can’t excel at all things, and I’m not advocating a mediocre generalism, but we have the capacity to be excellent at more things than we generally give ourselves credit for. Sure, you’ll suck at each new thing you try. But we all suck at each new thing we try. 

We just need the courage to keep on trying until we suck less and actually become competent and then good.

Jesse, the world of photography is going through radical upheaval. But within that upheaval is opportunity as well. A photojournalist’s career is going to be totally unlike what it was a generation ago but the world needs its images.

And when you get your foot into an editorial door. And you bring this diverse skill-set with you, your photography will begin to shine. And as it shines, your editors will start leaning on you more and more to go out and shoot more images.

You’ll still do many tasks across many disciplines but slowly you’ll angle towards that which you love.

You ask whether it’s foolish for someone to try to make a career in photojournalism right now. 

Flip that on it’s head and ask instead, what career can I make as a photographer and a journalist, and how do I get there? — Michael

PS., If you don’t know their work, I highly recommend looking at the portfolio of MediaStorm which has been doing groundbreaking photojournalism multimedia reporting for a number of years now.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

]]> http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/20/getting-around-the-new-york-times-paywall/feed/ 0 http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/19/advice-for-young-journalists-do-it/ http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/19/advice-for-young-journalists-do-it/#comments Fri, 19 Aug 2011 19:38:19 +0000 Michael Cervieri http://futurejournalismproject.org/post/9132347097

My advice? Do journalism now. Get a blog. Chase stories. Curate on Storify. Pitch. Don’t do minimum to get by. Do more. —@karlhodge

Journalism.co.uk queried the Internet for “Ten things every journalism student should know.”

Pictured above is number one. Click through for two through ten.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

]]> http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/19/advice-for-young-journalists-do-it/feed/ 0 http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/19/what-that-journalism-degree-might-get-you/ http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/19/what-that-journalism-degree-might-get-you/#comments Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:39:00 +0000 Michael Cervieri http://futurejournalismproject.org/post/9126326458
Salaries by Region

Salaries Compared

Median yearly salaries of 2010 Bachelor degree recipients with full-time jobs and media regional salaries of 2009 Bachelor degree recipients with full-time jobs.

Via the University of Georgia Cox Center 2010 Annual Survey of Journalism & Mass Communication Graduates:

For the fifth straight year, the median salary earned by those journalism and mass communication bachelor’s degree recipients who found full-time work was $30,000 (Chart 31). The median salary earned by master’s degree recipients was $36,200, a decline of nearly $3,000 from a year earlier.

These are nominal figures. If the salaries are adjusted for inflation, bachelor’s degree recipients reported a median salary that was $500 lower than a year earlier and more than $2,000 lower than comparable graduates earned in 2000. For master’s degree recipients, the 2010 median salary was roughly $1,500 less than master’s degree recipients earned in 2000.

Comparable data on other fields are not available. The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) reported in September of 2010 that the average annual starting salary offer to all college graduates had declined 0.7% over a year earlier, to $48,288.

A PDF of the survey is here.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

]]> http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/19/what-that-journalism-degree-might-get-you/feed/ 0 http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/18/framing-iraq-war-photography/ http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/18/framing-iraq-war-photography/#comments Thu, 18 Aug 2011 19:27:14 +0000 Michael Cervieri http://futurejournalismproject.org/post/9089192489

Benjamin Lowy has photographed conflict zones from Iraq, to Darfur to Afghanistan. His upcoming book, Iraq | Perspectives, is coming out this fall.

In an interview with Jörg Colberg, Lowy describes a series of photos taken from inside a Humvee:

Originally I began shooting out my car window because, at the time, it was the only way to photograph the Iraqi “street.” It was too dangerous to just simply walk. But I began shooting out these windows, mostly because my mother kept asking me what Iraq was like. What Baghdad was like. The only pictures she saw from me or other journalists were embeds, raids, bombs sites, and hospitals. So this was my attempt to photograph something different, to show her, to show people in the West, a different Iraq. At the same time, the framing mechanism of the window itself became part of the picture, it became a metaphor for the barrier between our worlds.

The interview itself is a recommended longread. In it, Lowry discusses the pressures of career and family when conflict zones are your place of work, what it means to be embedded and his perspective on the Iraq war in general.

Interview | Lowy’s site.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

• You don’t have enough time.
  Truth: You will never have enough time, so just get on with it.
• You don’t have enough money.
  Truth: You will never have enough money, so just get on with it.
• You don’t have a good idea.
  Everyone has good ideas; they just don’t write them down – so start writing every one down.

Click through for the rest.

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

—Leonie Brinkema, US Federal Judge. United States of America v. Jeffrey Alexander Sterling.

In a case involving an ex-CIA agent accused of revealing classified national security information, the US government tried to force New York Times reporter James Risen to reveal his sources for his 2006 book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (NPR review and excerpt).

Earlier this month Brinkema ruled Risen would not have to testify.

As explained by Charlie Savage in the New York Times:

The judge wrote that Mr. Risen was protected by a limited “reporter’s privilege” under the First Amendment, meaning that prosecutors had to prove that there was a compelling need for the reporter’s testimony and there that were no other means of obtaining the equivalent of that testimony. The government argued that such a privilege did not exist, but she recounted numerous other cases -– though none as high profile as the C.I.A. leak case -– in which other federal judges had invoked it.

Some background as we’ve followed this case is here.

http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/04/visualizing-violence-against-journalists-in-afghanistan/ http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/04/visualizing-violence-against-journalists-in-afghanistan/#comments Thu, 04 Aug 2011 13:55:00 +0000 Michael Cervieri http://futurejournalismproject.org/post/8471157755 Visualization: Ten years worth of attacks against those reporting the news in Afghanistan.]]>

Via MediaShift:

Internews and Nai, an Afghan media advocacy organization, have collected hundreds of reports of threats, intimidation, and violence faced by journalists in Afghanistan. We recently announced a new site, data.nai.org.af, which features 10 years of these reports. While Nai’s data previously resided in spreadsheets, the new site allows the public to access hundreds of reports through visualizations and to download it directly. With this site we’re raising the profile of media freedom in a country often characterized as among the most dangerous in the world for journalists.

Take, for example, the case of Omaid Khpalwak, a reporter with Pajhwok Afghan News who died recently in an attack on Tarin Kot, capital of Uruzgan.

Freelance journalists are among the top five groups experiencing violence. The others are formal news organizations.

For data wranglers, Internews and Nai are releasing the data in .csv and .geoJSON formats.

You can explore the infographic and export the data here. 

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.

]]> http://michael.cervieri.com/2011/08/04/visualizing-violence-against-journalists-in-afghanistan/feed/ 0

Here’s his overview on bloggers versus journalists:

Six years ago I wrote an essay called Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over. It was my most well read piece at the time. And it made the points you would expect: This distinction is eroding. This war is absurd. Get over it. Move on. There’s bigger work to be done.

But since then I’ve noticed that while the division–-bloggers as one type, journalists as another–-makes less and less sense, the conflict continues to surface. Why? Well, something must be happening under the surface that expresses itself through bloggers vs. journalists. But what is that subterranean thing? This is my real subject today.

Here’s the audio from his talk. 

And here’s an article from the Guardian about the talk.

Hope this helps. We look forward to hearing from you again. — Michael

Originally posted on the Future Journalism Project.